If You Want to Be Looked At Longingly on the Subway,
then I recommend picking up a copy of Marguerite Duras’s ‘The Lover’ as your something-sensational-to-read-on-the-train. It’s not the effect I was going for—it’s just the book that called to me most loudly from the ‘summer reading’ 10% off rack at McNally Robinson, swear—but I thought the phenomenon too interesting and, frankly, too pronounced not to share.
As for the book itself: I haven’t even gotten to the racy bits yet, and I already (a) want a pair of gold high heels, and (b) have the queasy feeling that I will end up regretting that statement if I finish the book. I’ll report back soon. In the meantime, I’m enjoying her prose. It’s lean, tonic, refreshing. Simple-sounding but not simple at all. I read most paragraphs twice and don’t even mind it. I am also enjoying the utter, definitive Frenchness of the barrage of poised but grumpy paragraphs whose point is to insist, beautifully, on the impossibility of saying anything at all, of ever making sense out of anything.
Then I look up to see who’s checking me out…and someone always is.
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