Marguerite Duras, Trans. by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan
RaveFull StopMe & Other Writing brings this facet of Duras to light. In doing so, the volume manages to offer an accessible primer to her work in general as well as a careful assessment of what it is like to attempt to render Duras’s prose into English ... she makes her reader attend to the silences and lacunae that puncture the landscape of not only her language but language itself. And for all that, her writing is still beautiful ... the infinite space, mediated by writing, between the legible and the inaccessible, is what Duras at her best offers the reader.
Johanna Stoberock
PositiveFull StopI will not call it a dystopian novel because that’s not really what it is—the desert island on which the entirety of Pigs takes place is utopia’s jetsam, its twisted underside, not its opposite ... Pigs might be more productively read...as an allegorical system bringing to the surface contradictions latent in the seemingly smooth fabric of the Real for which it serves as a fitful transliteration. Considering any of the novel’s eerily oneiric scenes or characters entails diving much deeper than the storybook language would at first lead you to believe ... The island unites contrarieties and invites the reader to tease out their constellations, to map the slight modifications and shades of degrees that separate innocence from terror, treasure from trash, and the best of all possible worlds from whatever horror is necessary to keep its gears turning.
