She doesn’t miss

Video review https://youtu.be/Hzu93GcDO2w

I don't feel that Duras ever truly figured out the novel , but there's something beautiful and quick about this one. I think: 'Me' her best work, The Ravishing something with magic in it, scattered around.

In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?

This novel strangely struck me as Australian. It is certainly comfortable and entitled. There are open spaces, contemporary convenience and a dearth of worry. What whirls in the wake is narrative. A middle class teen is abandoned by her fiancé. The psychic damage is absolute--yet politely understated. A decade later she has a suburban triumph of sorts. She's married well, has three children and seemingly every available advantage. Yet the fissures in her soul clamor for attention, if not redemption. A surrogacy of sorts ensues. One that was likely shocking for readers of the last century. It is all too complacent in its indolent destruction for my taste. Everything is muted, save for her husband's practicing the violin and the sound of voices from the next room. The rye fields outside the hotel are placed without emotion nor the unruly. Nature appears to have passed on this destination. There are passages which practically beg for empathy and yet reliance on artful dialogue didn't allow for either elevation or immanence. One of the protagonist admit to being indifferent to nearly everyone, I can relate, given the white drone of my reading. There was little to be found in terms of color or music.

I was really impressed by the first few chapters of this book, but after that... well, the writing made it difficult to follow. I like books that make me think or even one where I have to stop for a bit to consider, but I found myself re-reading pages I'd just read going "now who said this??" And yet... at times I really liked the narrator's way of telling the story. I liked when he would point out that he was trying to construct parts he couldn't know for sure. Probably what I need to do now (or someday kind of soon) is re-read the book. Now that I've worked through it once and understood some of the rougher spots, maybe I'd get a lot more from it.

Lol (Lola, not laugh-out-loud) is a prisoner in a memory. As a girl, she watched her fiancé swept away by another woman at a ball. She’s spent 10 years living inside that ball—reconstructing the events in a Proustian sorta madness. When she returns to that French resort town, she draws a friend & her lover into her dream world. A menage a trois twice told. An early (1964) Duras, the French master imagined Lol from a psychiatric patient. It doesn’t have The Lover’s erotic fever or The War’s stark details. But there’s a hypnotic pull. You might get trapped too.