Lol V. Stein is a young woman who, at a ball in a seaside casino in S. Tahla, watches her fiancé Michael Richardson leave with an older, glamorous woman, Anne-Marie Stretter. She seems to retreat into a trance-like state, recovers, marries and moves away, then returns years later. She begins to follow a couple, Tatiana Karl and Jacques Hold, who becomes the narrator, and tries to reconstruct her own lost scene of the ball.
Duras writes in a spare, circling style that leaves gaps in what happened and what the narrator invents. It's a favorite among readers of French modernist fiction and anyone curious about how obsession and absence can be drawn without conventional plotting.
Deep, inward-looking, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Literary Connoisseur. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 1976
- Publisher
- Folio
- ISBN
- 9782070368105
- Language
- FR
