Malady of Death Book

A novella, really a short story. A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. He "can't love" but wants to lean how. Although he hires her, she tells him she's not a prostitute. Death in this story refers to his inability to love.



Here's a passage that gives you a good idea of the writing style that uses extremely short sentences almost exclusively :

"The tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it's for her to say, she's the one who ought to know.
She answers softly, gently: Because you don't love. You say that's it.
She asks you to say it clearly.
You say: I don't love.
She says: Never?
You say: Never.
She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority - you don't know what that is, you've never experienced it?
You say: Never.
She looks at you, repeats: A dead man's a strange thing."



Here's the blurb from GR and on the book jacket:

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.



At the end the author gives a few pages of instructions about staging this story for the theatre or making a film of it. Written in 1982, it was staged as a play in 2018. Wikipedia tells us that during the time when Duras wrote this story, she was drinking 6 to 7 liters of wine a day and was in and out of the hospital, sometimes so incapacitated that she could not write. She dictated this story to her nurse.

The story did not appeal to me. Perhaps if I was into poetry and treated is as a haiku it would be more appealing. So unless you are into poetry, I don't really recommend it.

Top photo of a French beach in Basque country from nyt.com
Middle photo from meredithcorp.io
The author from groveatlantic.com

You say you can't know why, that you don't understand the malady you suffer from.

She smiles, says this is the first time, that until she met you, she didn't know death could be lived.


Your death has already begun.

Ένα μεγάλο ευχαριστώ στην Ιωάννα για την πρόταση της.

Το μόνο που μου έρχεται να πω είναι ένα quote του Oscar:
"Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark. and has the nature of infinity"

Και κλείνω πάλι με quote από το βιβλίο.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.