The Impudent Ones
Marguerite Duras, Tr. Kelsey L. Haskett
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Impudent Ones
Marguerite Duras, Tr. Kelsey L. Haskett
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
It is an event, and a very beautiful novel, but not what one might expect or be.
... reads like a dress rehearsal for The Lover, minus the temporal fluidity and linguistic skill.
Most notable is the psychological intensity of the central figure, mercilessly observant Maud, who boldly refuses to comply with familial or social expectations, and Duras’ ravishingly descriptive passages contrasting the stifling monotony of human struggles versus the glory and freedom of nature. With affairs, suicide, rivalry, gossip, desolation, betrayal, and dysfunction, rendered with touches of Flaubert, the Brontës, and Woolf, and illuminated via invaluable essays by translator Haskett and Duras’ biographer, Jean Vallier, this flawed yet intriguing novel is revealed to be the proving ground on which Duras taught herself how to cast her provocative spell..
Unfortunately a peculiarly bland work of juvenilia, a boring book about bored, bourgeois people.