Marguerite Duras, Trans. by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books Translators Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan have compiled a neat collection for Dorothy, a publishing project, intended to be a \'guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction.\' This description is a little ironic. While it is true that she has written in a variety of mediums, even when you only consider the nonfiction, her voice takes priority over the ostensible constraints of any particular form. That is to say, it all sounds exactly like Duras ... The pieces in Me & Other Writing showcase Duras’s thoughts on reading, writing, motherhood, and politics, but the subject of any piece is Duras herself, something the title of this compilation brings to the fore. Essays move forward based on the obscure and often brilliant pattern of Duras’s thoughts, not through a rhetorical rubric ... This is the timbre of Duras’s voice: equal parts liberating and exasperating, tender and self-centered. She radiates a tacit compassion for other people that is embodied in her unwillingness to talk down to them by making anything easier ... A certain kind of personal-meets-political writing has saturated contemporary literature, wherein the author introduces a number of topics and impressions that seem disparate but are woven together over the length of the work so that meaning is suggested rather than announced ... Duras couldn’t be further stylistically from this bad-faith insouciance. She’ll start with one topic and end somewhere radically different, with no effort made to \'tie it all together\' ... All the while, she skips between striking statements about herself, about art, about meaning, morality, and love. There are no boundaries.
Ben Lerner
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of Books... the center doesn’t quite hold...Darren’s arc is almost anticlimatic ... it is difficult to maintain the momentum going backward, split up as it is, and additionally it verges on exploitative, or perhaps too obvious, to make Darren — a mentally disabled teenager so disturbed that he often hides in bushes by a park — a foil for Adam, the debate champion. Deflating what would conventionally be a point of convergence is all too fitting for The Topeka School’s historical scope, however. It should be a comfort that no one’s life is completely determined by any one moment, if for no other reason than because nothing is actually a climax in the scope of history.
Anne Boyer
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...beautiful ... The Undying is the spellbinding result of a brilliant mind confined to the sickbed, facing the destruction of her body and her routine life. Informing every element of the text is the question of what literature can \'do\' for the living and the dying; what art, as a whole, is obligated to do in the service of the world ... What Boyer’s cancer reveals from inside her, with radical intimacy, is the infiltration of capitalism within our very bodies ... The Undying is another refusal, of equal eloquence and poignance ... The explicit challenge of The Undying is to find a way to write about breast cancer that does not merely replicate existing narratives, nor add to the din of \'awareness\' ... Boyer writes with such power, grace, and economy that The Undying is nearly impossible to put down ... If chemotherapy is a \'total strike\' — destroying gray matter, hair follicles, digestion, memory, speech processing, bone density, and the muscles around the heart, to name only a few — The Undying is an equally thorough and devastating rejoinder ... It would be a mistake to take The Undying’s tone of cool remove for anything except rage at the injustices wrought by a world Boyer loves ... Yet the reader can never forget how much pain she went through to write this book. She wants to tell the truth, not grant readers the voyeur’s moral pluralism ... Though there are certainly people who willingly consume cancer narratives, many more will be repelled by such an ostensibly sad book. She can’t afford for this to happen. Capitalism wants you to ignore your body until it cries out. And who are the ones in the most pain? The poor, the exhausted. Her un-dying will not be for nothing.
