The Ravishing of Lol Stein

First published in France in 1964, Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein) is a mesmerising novel of desire, memory and the uncertain boundaries of identity. At a summer ball in the fictional town of S. Tahla, nineteen-year-old Lol Stein watches her fiancé, Michael Richardson, abandon her for an older woman, Anne-Marie Stretter; the experience leaves her profoundly altered. A decade later, married and outwardly settled, Lol returns to the place of her youth, where her friendship with Tatiana Karl and her fascination with Tatiana’s lover, Jacques Hold, draw her back towards the scene of her original loss.

Moving through repetition, silence and shifting perspectives, Duras refuses the consolations of a straightforward psychological explanation, leaving Lol’s inner life tantalisingly beyond reach. The novel explores the instability of memory, the consuming nature of desire and the strange possibilities of watching and being watched. Widely regarded as a turning point in Duras’s career, it brings her spare, hypnotic prose to a new level of formal daring, occupying a distinctive place in postwar French literature and in the evolution of the modern novel.

From the book

“Nothing is given to Lol Stein. She takes.”

— Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

On The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“One of the most fascinating and original novels of the twentieth century.”

— Madeleine Borgomano, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (Foliothèque; translated from the French)