Publication
Amsterdam Hölderlin cop. 1984
ISBN
9071044041 / 9789071044045
Language
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Description
A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.… (more)
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User reviews
LibraryThing member m.gilbert
This review could easily end up being longer than the actual text, which is approximately 5,000 words. I am fighting sleep at this hour to explain why I enjoyed this book immensely. It is a a moving, erotic story that explores the relationship between sex, love, and death. The book is really about
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a soul which has died and its means of finding love through (as it seems) "meaningless" sex, often in complete silence, a strange kind of voiceless ecstasy. A man (whom the author addresses as "you") hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea where he suffers and longs to feel something, anything, in that brief period of time. The language of the text is what I would expect from Marguerite Duras: terse yet lyrical prose, moving in the way it injects simple, familiar words with the weight of emptiness and passion and suffering. I could read this book again (it would take all but 30 minutes if I linger on a passage or two) and be moved in the same way as I was the first time. The most remarkable exchange between the man and women occurs here, perhaps my favorite lines in the entire work: "You ask how loving can happen--the emotion of loving. She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? She says: It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, oneself, often without knowing how." Show Less
LibraryThing member edwinbcn
La maladie de la mort is a surrealistic short novel about a man who pays a woman to stay with him in a house near the sea. All day and all night, the young woman lies, sleeping or slumbering in bed. The man, who has never had a lover, cannot bring himself to love, to possess the woman. From
La maladie de la mort is an enigmatic tale with the quality of an allegory. The story was almost conceived like the oracle in Delphi, as during the dictation Marguerite Duras was heavily intoxicated. The man, sometimes thought to be gay, may stand for all men, and his inability to love, not just for the act of love, but inability for true love. Elsewhere, Marguerite Duras has said that she sees herself as a woman who has always lived in houses near the sea, and that her writing, as the true writing of all women should be, about desire. The inaction of the man effectively shows him to be impotent, while the woman in her passivity seems to take control.
La maladie de la mort has a very poetic quality, and reads almost as much as a dramatic monologue.
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unrecorded words she murmurs in her sleep, the man's condition is pronounced as La maladie de la mort.La maladie de la mort is an enigmatic tale with the quality of an allegory. The story was almost conceived like the oracle in Delphi, as during the dictation Marguerite Duras was heavily intoxicated. The man, sometimes thought to be gay, may stand for all men, and his inability to love, not just for the act of love, but inability for true love. Elsewhere, Marguerite Duras has said that she sees herself as a woman who has always lived in houses near the sea, and that her writing, as the true writing of all women should be, about desire. The inaction of the man effectively shows him to be impotent, while the woman in her passivity seems to take control.
La maladie de la mort has a very poetic quality, and reads almost as much as a dramatic monologue.
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LibraryThing member varielle
Maybe if I were an existentialist I would have appreciated this more. Depressed individual hires a woman to stay with him by the sea for a few days to try to learn how to love. He wasn't successful, but at least nobody got murdered, we think, though that could explain the disappearance. Hmmm. There
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was just entirely too much sleeping going on. Show Less
Original publication date
1982 (France)