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L'Amour (1971)

by Marguerite Duras(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1934824798 (ISBN13: 9781934824795)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Open Letter Books

review 1: This slim novel is the third in a trilogy of books I haven't read. After reading the afterward, I got the impression that I would understand it better if I had read the first two sections. As it is, I'm stuck with a confusing, small book, without character names, a bare bones novel stripped of every word that does not matter, making it such a surreal experience that a 98 page translation takes much longer to read. It is as if there is a world of novel between each line, each piece of dialogue, each movement and daybreak. I like reading like this sometimes; those books where nothing is spelled out for you and you don't know where you are going at all. This creates a kind of tension inside of the reader and brings the reader closer to the book.I haven't read the other two pa... morerts of this trilogy, I am sure that I'm missing the importance of some of these scenes, but the great thing about reading it by itself is that I can interpret it the way that I want. I do not go into this with any sort of guide and I get to create the scenes in my head however I want. I can be completely wrong without any type of conscious. This makes the novel somewhat refreshing. It reads fast if you don't want to spend a great amount of time thinking about what might really be happening because it is written like a film script and prose poem, so sparse and forgiving that there is so much interpretation that can be done, even if it is wrong to the original plot that it was based on. I say read this novel only. If you want to go back and see what it really was about by reading the other two novels, then do it. I personally like my own interpretation of the story, no matter how far off from the truth it is.
review 2: Never before translated into English (at AWP I got a draft translation), this is the semi-surreal sequel to The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, one of Duras's great masterpieces. This is a sparse, poetic book, with most of the "normal" elements of the novel having been stripped away. It almost feels like a French movie, with "Her" (Lol Stein) sleeping on the beach of S. Thala, "imprisoned" in a sort of mental home seventeen years after the events of the earlier book, and "Him" watching over her, with the "Traveler" (Michael Richardson) come back to see Her and commit suicide. It's a really lovely book, evocative, elusive, and provocative. Definitely deserves to be made available to English readers. (More on that soon.) less

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