Marguerite Duras, trans. by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... the quintessential Duras tone is already here – stripped-down staccato sentences, remorseless introspection ... There is urgency and precision to the writing; Nicolas, Tiène, Luce and Francine herself are intriguing and credible characters. The style may be clipped, but the setting and lifestyle are slipped into the action ... This mannered style of deliberate abstraction can seem in one paragraph merely pretentious, and then serve up a line that is illuminating and accurate ... The ending is unexpected, and feels arbitrary ... But Duras was only 30 when this novel was published. This is the writing of her youth, experimental in every sense, a precursor indeed of the sparse later style for which she was distinguished, but perhaps without its precision. And there is a significant cumulative effect. The writing creates an effective climate for the story; it has energy and self-sufficiency that nicely convey the claustrophobia and sexual tension of the group and the place. Francine can irritate, but she is also a persuasive narrator. Eight decades on, Duras’s nascent talent is on display here.
Michael Ondaatje
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is a book that requires close reading. A sentence, a reference, will signal something yet to come ... This is a book rich with detail. The reader is bound to be conscious of a hidden ballast of research...but so deft is the writing that you forget this, simply appreciating the meticulous background that brings alive a time and a place ... But it’s often the telling image that’s the most striking, the incidental note that summons up the living past ... [an] intricate and absorbing novel.
Cathleen Schine
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAn extensive cast, then, one that allows for an extensive exploration of the fine balance between affection and exasperation that marks family relationships and, above all, the parent-child bond ... Widowed after a long marriage, Joy is a persuasive character, intelligent, independent, with a flair for witty responses and wry thoughts, though in fact everyone in Schine’s narrative is given to sharp comment and occasionally manic behavior. Despite its subject matter, They May Not Mean To, but They Do is a very funny novel ... Cathleen Schine writes with economy and style — saying most by saying least, employing brief staccato sentences, with much of the action unfolding by way of dialogue. Some readers might feel that too much levity surrounds some disturbing matters — a farcical deathbed scene, the humiliations of colostomy bags and incontinence. But others will see this as a proper form of defiance.
