Positive4columnsIt is an event, and a very beautiful novel, but not what one might expect or be ... She was twenty-six when she wrote it, and seventy when she wrote The Lover . By then she was a master. In this first novel, she is a young woman sorting things out ... an old-fashioned novel with fairly conventional language, which the blunt Marguerite Duras herself called very bad. It’s not bad, it’s just not what we think of when we think of Marguerite Duras ... These are the roots of all to come. Seeds are planted in this strange soil, of writing, of solitude. An appreciation of solitude. The cultivation of alone time. Her themes seem to remain the same: longing, staring out the window, horizons, love, loss, not wanting to be observed, feeling judged, but also judging. The life of the mind gives her some power over her melancholia ... Early Duras is almost nineteenth-century in her description of the countryside, the furniture, the ways in which we fall from grace. But there is a happy ending (of sorts). Before the economy of style came the excess, an excess born of romanticism.
Marcel Proust, Trans. by Lydia Davis
Mixed4Columns...in this sad/funny book of letters from Marcel Proust to his neighbor, should resonate with any city dweller who has ever been subjected to noise from without and despair from within ... He [Proust] remains meticulous and articulate in all things, though he does ignore punctuation ...foreword by Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié and the afterword by celebrated French translator Lydia Davis serve as codes to these letters, through which we catch a glimpse of the writer’s idiosyncratic domestic life...note contains all of the pathos of feeling at the mercy of one’s neighbors, its specificity, its agitation, its deliberate formality ... The pretext of these letters may be noise, but the context is war, and the subtext is loss. Proust is seeking solace in the domestic and carrying on.
