3.5 stars

read for class, review to come later, after i've written my essay :)

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okay i'm back and if you saw me turning in my essay 24 hours late no you didn't

i enjoyed this book far more than i expected to. i thought this was a really lovely translation that had some beautiful turns of phrases, and the writing was stunning. the narrative is very much nonlinear in a postmodern way, i liked how duras wove storylines through one another by playing w the chronology of events. now i see how her affair with the chinese man was the lena through which she was able to analyse her family traumas, as though unable to look at it directly like the sun unless filtered through another event. you never really hear about specifics about her brother's death, but i feel like that's the point; it's not really about what happened but its effects on you in the wake of it, and that very much gets conveyed.