2/28/2023 0 Comments Stack of books drawing![]() ![]() Only from the vantage of old age can Duras, whose writing consistently deals with sexual and self-possession, recognize that there was some kind of real love between her past self and the older man.Įrpenbeck, born and brought up behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin, titled her 2008 novel Heimsuchung, which means “Homeseeking.” While Visitation is an elegant English translation, it doesn’t completely convey what the author does with the home the novel revolves around. The affair she experiences takes place in a strange bubble, at the nexus of different, dramatic types of power. Like her young narrator, Duras wound up in a relationship with a much older man however, the author did not write The Lover until she was 70 years old-making the novel’s hypnotic language, combining sharp personal memory with a young person’s scant adult knowledge of love and desire, even more arresting. But those who have read The Lover recognize the shocking immediacy of its narrator’s perspective, which defies her characterization of her work, and draws from Duras’s remembrance of what her own life was like as an adolescent girl in then-French Indochina (in what is now Vietnam). I wrote it when I was drunk.” That last sentence is probably true Duras spent a large portion of her life drinking. “ The Lover is a load of shit,” Duras told a colleague. The Crocodile is a darkly funny examination of a culture caught between gentility and productivity, one that, like ours, couples too much information with too little listening to others. Does a crocodile with a man inside make for a more expensive novelty act? If the crocodile is killed to save Ivan, is that a waste of valuable property? What gives this the immersive scope of a novel, rather than that of a novella or a short story, are the high stakes of the bystanders’ decisions and of the shocking revelations from Ivan’s wife, all of which will affect his future-meanwhile, Ivan finds the new quarters ever more cozy and hospitable for his bureaucratic work. Said creature swallows Ivan, and various characters of many different stations argue what to do for him-or not do. The narrator accompanies his friend Ivan and Ivan’s wife, Elena, to a public show that includes the eponymous beast. ![]() The Crocodile, by the great Russian writer Dostoyevsky, is incredibly brief, and it’s a sharp social satire with plenty of teeth. This is most often characterized as a short story, but it’s substantive enough to have been published in its own volume multiple times. It's not the tale of a monarch who wants to become an author or a pundit rather, it’s that of a woman in a public role who wishes-just like so many other busy women-to reclaim a private space for her own peace. She attempts to shrug off various royal obligations by claiming she’s involved in her latest book, and when her private secretary, Sir Kevin, suggests that HRH might “harness your reading to some larger purpose-the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance,” she tartly responds “One reads for pleasure … It is not a public duty.” Her family appreciate her newfound pastime because it means she leaves them alone, but things devolve as the Queen grows sloppier in her clothing choices and spends more and more of her time talking about books with courtiers who couldn’t care less about literature. In the famed dramatist Alan Bennett’s novel, Queen Elizabeth II discovers a traveling library in a van by happy accident and becomes addicted to reading, with unexpected and sometimes hilarious results. ![]()
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