I started The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas by Marguerite Duras, which is included in her Four Novels (Grove).
It's a slight misnomer of a title since some of the four works (all of them?) included in this compendium are novellas rather than novels.
The writing is gorgeous and the later Duras is prefigured in this early work. She has begun to use some of her more rhetorical tropes and figures, but she's still playing the "straight novelist," so she does this in moderation.
It's hard to miss the strong similarity this work bears to Mann's Death in Venice. This is so much a tale about age, about an individual in the process of leaving this world. The protagonist is a seventy-eight-year-old man completely taken for granted and virtually erased by all those around him. So far it's an interior monologue (his) that is exquisitely tortured and nuanced. He's plunked down outside on a hot summer day, abandoned, so Duras luxuriates in describing the nature which surrounds him and encroaches upon him in that almost Robbe-Grillet way. There's really no place in this work where language is merely functional. Virtually every sentence is a poetic pivot or fulcrum. You keep losing yourself as a reader in the moments between the moments. But that's what Duras does so well. Her prose is designed to open up those interiorities in language. So there's always almost an infinite regress the attuned reader experiences when reckoning the terms of her language, her concept of description, which is more poetic than factual, more connotative than denotative.
It's a slight misnomer of a title since some of the four works (all of them?) included in this compendium are novellas rather than novels.
The writing is gorgeous and the later Duras is prefigured in this early work. She has begun to use some of her more rhetorical tropes and figures, but she's still playing the "straight novelist," so she does this in moderation.
It's hard to miss the strong similarity this work bears to Mann's Death in Venice. This is so much a tale about age, about an individual in the process of leaving this world. The protagonist is a seventy-eight-year-old man completely taken for granted and virtually erased by all those around him. So far it's an interior monologue (his) that is exquisitely tortured and nuanced. He's plunked down outside on a hot summer day, abandoned, so Duras luxuriates in describing the nature which surrounds him and encroaches upon him in that almost Robbe-Grillet way. There's really no place in this work where language is merely functional. Virtually every sentence is a poetic pivot or fulcrum. You keep losing yourself as a reader in the moments between the moments. But that's what Duras does so well. Her prose is designed to open up those interiorities in language. So there's always almost an infinite regress the attuned reader experiences when reckoning the terms of her language, her concept of description, which is more poetic than factual, more connotative than denotative.
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