Recommendations
Books Like Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein by Marguerite Duras
Books for readers who loved Lol's ecstasy of abandonment and Duras's study of desire that watches from outside
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) is Duras's most psychologically complex novel — Lol's ecstasy at being abandoned at a ball, her return ten years later to watch from outside the scene of another couple's desire, the unreliable narrator Jack Hold. These 8 books share its interest in triangular desire, its study of the woman who watches rather than participates, and its refusal of simple psychological resolution.
- 1
Buy on AmazonModerato cantabile
by Marguerite Duras
The shorter companion — read first if this is your introduction to Duras; the same structure of obsessive desire and the same bare prose, in a more compressed form.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Le Vice-consul
by Marguerite Duras
The companion novel in the India Song cycle — Anne-Marie Stretter reappears in Calcutta, and the Vice-consul screams his desire into the night; the two novels are meant to be read together as part of the same cycle.
- 3
Buy on AmazonPale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Kinbote's commentary is an elaborate fiction constructed around an absent centre, just as Jack Hold's narrative is a fiction constructed around Lol's absence from herself — both novels make the unreliability of the narrating consciousness a form of desire.
- 4
Buy on AmazonA Spy in the House of Love
by Anaïs Nin
Nin's Sabina moves through New York pursuing desire in a structure of voyeurism and projection — a different cultural register but the same interest in a woman who experiences desire as something outside herself that she must pursue.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across three decades whose inner lives exist outside the visible surface of their days — shares the Duras preoccupation with the gap between a woman's social performance and her actual experience.
- 6
Buy on AmazonWritten on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
An unnamed narrator obsessing over a lost love — Winterson's refusal of stable identity in the narrator mirrors Duras's refusal of stable narrative in Lol V. Stein, and both are about the impossibility of fully possessing the object of desire.
- 7
Buy on AmazonJealousy
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
A husband watching his wife from outside — the purest Nouveau Roman study in the watching position that Lol adopts from the rye field; both novels make surveillance a form of desire.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Waves
by Virginia Woolf
Six consciousnesses rendered in interior monologue as they age — Woolf's experiment with point of view and the dissolution of the stable self has the same formal ambition as Le Ravissement, and both are interested in what it would mean to narrate from a position that is not a unified subject.
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