"He said, 'Look here, leave it all, you're building on ruins.'"

This is like a well-written postcard to a distant relative, in that I don't think it actually says anywhere near as much as it thinks it does, but it says it very nicely. A staging of this as a play might work a lot better than the novella, because it's about 90% dialogue and 10% stage direction (she moved here, he did this, she moved there) and there's not a lot of visuals. It also does that really, really annoying thing that a lot of Beckett-esque texts do, which is having characters repeat themselves multiple times to make sure that you know that what they're saying is important or foreshadowing.

I have to admit that I have no real idea what this book is about. It's completely and deliberately inaccessible. It's anti-communist (or at least anti-soviet), that much I can tell, but I'm not entirely sure why; something about individuality and labour. It uses Jewishness and Jewish identity in a very odd way for an author who is not Jewish, and uses the iconography of Auschwitz to represent a greater and more universal sense of not-belonging, which I found a bit iffy. Duras is clearly an author who doesn't shy away from things that people might find a bit iffy, but I honestly don't think that Auschwitz imagery like this is particularly successful because it is so far removed from any experiences that the vast majority of us will ever have or be exposed to. Saying that 'we are all from Auschstaadt' doesn't actually mean as much as Duras might think it does, because none of us knows what being from or at Auschwitz would have been like or would have done to a person. Although, perhaps the inaccessibility of that experience is somehow linked to the inaccessibility of this book as a whole. I don't know. I'd have to reread the book to get a better insight into that, and honestly, I have no real intention of doing that. Reading it once was confusing enough.

A further edit would not have gone amiss, as there were several errors in the text. I can look past that ordinarily, but in a text which is already almost impossible to understand and needs very careful reading, the mistakes stand out more, because you do need to focus on absorbing every word and letter, and they are also twice as irksome, because they impede the understanding of an already oblique text. A special mention should probably go to the translator here, as I can imagine that a text as simultaneously dense and delicate as this one would have been a real challenge.

If you like books that are entirely evasive and require multiple readings to penetrate the various layers therein, or if you're a huge fan of Beckett and need your fix of texts in that vein, then go ahead and read this one. If you don't fit into those two niches - which I clearly do not - then do yourself a favour and just don't.