Ravishing of Lol Stein

Rating:
Summary: Yuck--boring
Review: I read for some time waiting for it to be interesting. No such luck.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting, Erotically Charged Novel of Memory
Review: Lol Stein was nineteen years old when her fiance, Michael Richardson, abandoned her. The moment lives starkly in Lol's memory, even after she's been married for ten years, after she's had three children, after she should have moved on with her life. The memory endures until it can be revised, until Lol can make a new memory to replace it.

Tatiana Karl, Lol's best friend in childhood, was with Lol the night her fiance left her. He did it publicly, at a prominent dance in the Town Beach casino, while Lol and Tatiana watched. Lol collapses in a state of depression, becomes uncommunicative, changes. She is brought back to South Tahla, the place of her birth, to recover. It is here that she meets John Bedford, marries him and seemingly moves on with her life, literally leaving South Tahla, as well, for ten years and breaking off all contact with old friends, including Tatiana. But the memory lingers, darkly, and can only be erased when Lol and her husband return to South Tahla, return to the place where the memory was made.

Lol works at erasing the mental trauma of her past with a new memory, a memory wrought from obsession, voyeurism, and calculated seduction. She resumes her relationship with Tatiana, now married, and makes a new relationship with Tatiana's lover. Haunting and erotically charged, marked by a disturbing psychological aridity, and written in a complex, non-linear style marked by the shifting viewpoint of its narrator, "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" is another example of why Marguerite Duras deserves to be ranked as one of the finest writers of Twentieth century literature.

Rating:
Summary: Duras is a genius. "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" a stunner.
Review: The protagonist in Lol Stein SEES her fiancee fall in love with another girl/woman. After this VISION which of course, is no vision but real, she rambles about it not being so late just the light makes it so and becomes a shut in and an eccentric.

Later in life she enjoys watching an old female friend meet with a suitor and one imagines to fix the first "GREAT" loss... then there is a melancholy end as Lol ceases to be a mere voyeur and gets caught up in life once again.

Poignant, astonishing, philosophical, emotional.

Duras is an amazing writer and I haven't read anything I could call "disappointing." Known so well for "The Lover" in my mind her better works are obscured by the late contemporary taste for such formulaic linear writing as Duras uses to great effect in "The Lover."

Lol Stein is a wonderful antiheroine trapped in the web of emotion, the impact of events, and the spell of sensuality, vision, and time.

A must read.

Rating:
Summary: Yuck--boring
Review: _The Ravishing of Lol Stein_ tells the story of a woman who watches her fiance abandon her for another woman and feels compelled to reenact the tragedy in later life.

It's a compelling premise, but I found myself curiously unmoved by the characters and ultimately by the writing itself-- it seemed too inflated with its own sense of tragedy and pathos and I felt like a crucial sense of humor was somehow missing from the situation.

I used to really enjoy Duras when I would read her in my early twenties, so I'm not sure if it was the individual book that I didn't like, or whether I've just lost my taste for the emotional drama that she specializes in as a writer.