Description: Similar in tone to a Beckett play, the characters of this novel spend the night discussing violence, communism, and revolution.
Review Quotes:
"Duras stands perennial and relevant, effecting and fraught. Any chance to encounter her psychological terrain is cause to awe, to be shaken out of compliant identification, comfortable desire, and to slip the frame."--Douglas A. Martin
". . . [A] gripping meditation on the nature of fear, silence, and survival."--Kirkus Reviews
"...the book has a poetic quality that allows it to offer an eerie parable of paranoia and persecution, bigotry and fear, anti-Semitism and capitalism. Timely and timeless, it shows, among other things, how absurd and damaging it can be to live in terror, and what a 'great tiredness' one experiences, either in fearing or in doing the bidding of demagogues"--Chicago Tribune
"Beautifully cut to the bone yet increasingly absurdist, the narrative delivers an unsettling sense of ideology run amok. It's challenging and not always satisfying but will attract those serious about their reading"--Barbara Hoffert, Reading the World"This late-vintage Duras, published in 1970 and in translation for the first time, by Kazim Ali, throbs with menace and complex questions about identity"--BBC Culture