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MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Open Letter Books
$12.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: A young man on holiday in Italy walks out on his mistress and meets Anna - a beautiful, enigmatic woman who lives on a great white yacht. Anna is rich, and her life is entirely occupied with searching for her lover, the sailor from Gibraltar. She takes on the young man temporarily as her lover, and recounts to him the story of the sailor. The young man accompanies Anna on her search - a journey which takes them to France and Africa - even into the heart of the jungle. Slowly, love grows between them, and the sailor becomes not an impediment but an excuse which allows their love to flourish. Yet they exist in a state of suspension - for the sailor may always turn up to claim Anna.
My Review: A lush, louche, languid read about a woman who can't be bothered to make up her mind what to do with all the world's goods. A rich American, a bored French dude, a yacht, and Africa. It went straight to my head like any cocktail with too many ingredients will. The hangover was Calder's lack of desire to reprint and sell it...I wanted to tell people about how cool it was.
Give it to your COVID-addled college-age nephew to scratch the itch for adventure safely and vicariously.
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THE LITTLE HORSES OF TARQUINIA
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Ann Lenore Derrickson)
Out of print
$14.00 and up
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: “There are no vacations from love….”
In this careful translation from the French novel by Marguerite Duras, five Parisians spend an interminable three days of their vacations at a dreary Italian beach resort. There is nothing to do but talk, drink bitter Camparis, and contemplate (or perhaps consummate) a love affair or two. As the days wear on, they imperceptibly change some of their beliefs, from “For some time I have not liked the idea of changing the world at all costs” to “But certainly it is necessary to change the world,” concluding with “There are no vacations from love….Love, it is necessary to live it completely with its boredom and everything; there are no vacations from that.”
My Review: Not for the young. It is brutally frank and unspeakably cruel. It possesses itself of, in, a kind of soporific addictive ennui that someone who has never been in love with an other for a long time can dare to conjure, still less enact.
This is the burden of the book's refrain:
“There are no vacations from love,” he said. “That does not exist. Love, it is necessary to live it completely with its boredom and everything; there are no vacations possible for that.”
He was speaking without looking at her, facing the river.
“And that is love. To distract yourself from it, one cannot. Like life, with its beauty, its shit and its boredom.”
If that frightens you, read it; if it confuses you, don't.
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THE MALADY OF DEATH
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Grove Press
$16.00 all editions, available now
Rating: 4* of five
MAY 2021 UPDATE $1.99 on Kindle!
The Publisher Says: A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a “she,” a warm, moist body with a beating heart—the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn to love. It isn’t a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to try . . .
This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, “perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe,” and its absence, “the malady of death.”
My Review: Women are the bitterest, cruelest, most reductive misogynists known to Humankind.
You say she mustn't speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and to your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they're exhausted and let the men come to them while they're asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape molding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God's. And also so that little by little, as day dawns, you may be less afraid of not knowing where to put your body or at what emptiness to aim your love.
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BLUE EYES, BLACK HAIR
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Out of print
various prices
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Emotionally charged, sparsely written, and vicariously compelling, Marguerite Duras's novel centers on the desire of a young man for another man he has only glimpsed once, but with whom he falls desperately in love.
My Review: To be honest, it felt to me like this was a book whose existence was not to entertain others but to codify and clarify Duras's sense of women's interchangability to men. Men LOVE and with a weird intensity in all Duras's stories of whatever stripe. But the objects of their love, their obsessive needy desperate addiction, can...shift.
All the way to gay, in this book. But what does he do, our impassioned and exquisitely aesthetic lover? He seeks and finds a woman who looks like His Man and talks about it to her.
Very, very French. And it's in a squalid, down-at-heel seaside resort. Very, very Duras.
I believe this could very easily be the most profound idea Duras ever uttered in her novels:
She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
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