indulge me
No one is telling me that I must like this book, and that is just as well because I do not. This book, Marguerite Duras’ Yann Andréa Steiner is not a bad book, but it is a self-indulgent one, and it approaches the reader with the watery over-familiarity of acknowledged eminence and suffering, for which the reader is assumed to feel a humble appreciation, awe, desire, and sympathy. Yes, well, the world is a vale of suffering – you have suffered – but what do you mean to do about it (besides wringing your hands and crying aloud eheu, eheu! before collapsing on the shoulder of an attractively dangerous 1 young person)? This same complacent passivity, this will-to-suffer (or perhaps, will-to-be-overwhelmed-by-the-evil-of-the-world) and have one’s suffering admired is the same reason I do not like what little I’ve read of Modiano. What call is there, really, for a reader to witness this suffering, that is both too great and too little to be shoved into the girdle of a novella? I have no patience for it.
And there, the book had ended.
That Theodora was too much for a book. Too much.
You said, ‘Too little, perhaps.’ (109)
And if you aren’t able to speak of it, if you aren’t able to make a story of it, if it is too much, too little, or too much of enough, well then, begad, stop fussing! 2
- Or monstrously virile.[↩]
- I will admit, however, that reading a collection of Muriel Spark short stories did not put me in the best frame of mind to appreciate what Duras was up to. Then again, I very much doubt I was the intended or ideal reader of the book in any case. [↩]