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reissemyy 's review for:
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
by Marguerite Duras
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
This novel is a feverish, clinical study of a woman, Lol, for whom early abandonment becomes awakening, fetish, and obsession. What follows in her narrative arc isn’t healing; it’s a life spent restaging that original moment. Witness and denial become eroticisms, watching becomes intimacy, distance a form of closeness—with Lol caught in the endless loop, willingly or unwillingly (we may never know), of her own dissociated gaze.
Duras writes as if dissecting a specimen, stripping thematic desire bare until only form remains. The heat is secondary to its observation; the body, a game piece in a theater of distance and orchestration. All told, it’s a fascinating, dry intellectualization of power and play.
Duras writes as if dissecting a specimen, stripping thematic desire bare until only form remains. The heat is secondary to its observation; the body, a game piece in a theater of distance and orchestration. All told, it’s a fascinating, dry intellectualization of power and play.