The Ravishing Of Lol Stein (1986) - Plot & Excerpts
so there's this chick Lol Stein, a real blank broad, gets ditched by her cougar-lovin' fiance. bitch goes crazy, but the quiet kinda crazy, the kinda crazy you keep to yourself. girl gets married to some musician type. years later, she's a mother of three, living in her old town, and she gets wrapped up in her hottie best friend's life. the best friend is busy giving it up to this prick, a dapper don who works with her husband at the local hospital. Lol gets obsessed with the douchebag. some boring get-togethers happen. Lol spends some time watching the hotel room where the two are busy banging it out. mr douche spends some time wondering what is up with Lol. finally Lol and the ever-curious prick take a long-assed train trip to the place where Lol was first ditched years ago. they sit on the beach a while and talk some bullshit. finally, they bone. the end.so there is an empty vessel. her name is Lol Stein. some say her mind became bent when she was betrayed by her lover; others say her mind was always a blank. Lol is a being who has let form define meaning; she has built her life around ideas such as what should a house and home look like? and how should a wife act, how should a scorned lover feel? Lol begins to be obsessed with her friend's affair... she wants to watch where the two lovers go, she wants to be a silent witness to their acts, she wants to find meaning in the forms of their passion. she wants their passion to fill her. in turn, her friend's lover becomes obsessed with her... he wants to understand what lies beneath that glassy surface, he wants to see his passion reflected upon it. is the nature of their different obsessions simply to be obsessed with the idea of an obsession? is that the nature of passion, of obsession... form eventually becoming meaning?so there is a french writer, Marguerite Duras. her novels are not written in the classic literary form; her works are a part of the Nouveau roman - they are anti-tradition. her novels reject such stand-bys as narrative, characterization, plot. her novels take the details of the world, the form of her characters' actions, and centralizes them so that these details, these descriptions of form, become the meaning itself. in her focus on these physical details, on the physicality of actions, she could possibly be considered a sensual writer. and yet this distance, this separation of incident from emotion, this focus on dividing intellectual contemplation from emotional reaction, makes her works an often clinical, alienating experience. ironically enough, her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein is ostensibly about passion and voyeurism and the nature of love, the meaning of obsession, the traps and tricks of perspective and point of view. it is a passionless rendering of the various forms of passion.so there is a reviewer, mark monday, a shallow kind of guy, one with an automatic bias against the intellectualization of sensuality. he finds it distasteful, hollow, unreal. even worse, he finds it to be Not Hot. perhaps he is merely symptomatic of gender essentialism at its most prosaic - a man who responds to visual, sensory outputs like all men supposedly do - the kind of guy who wants visceral activity, sensual description, the kind of dude who is intimately familiar with the pornographic appeal of the extreme close-up detail. he wants it to be real. and so he rejects Duras' frosty attempt to deconstruct the nature of passion and obsession. it leaves him cold.so there is this guy, Mark M_____, he's rather an intellectual sort. he is a thinker. one of his favorite films is Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by Marguerite Duras. he admires the film's ability to position two living, breathing characters as - eventually - something both less and more than human... as archetypes for all lovers, for all individuals seeking meaning in escape, in passion, in the forms that meaning takes, within the at-times obliterating, all-encompassing physicality of each other's arms. he admires Duras' distance. he enjoys her lack of reliance on traditional narrative, plot, and characterization. in particular, he appreciates how, in books like The Ravishing of Lol Stein, the reader can literally pick any random page and, reading that page, understand the meaning of the entire work. each detail is symptomatic of the whole. he loves that.so there was this bookish kid, Mark, who worked in the a/v department (of course) while going to school at ucsd. one evening he was in charge of a special screening of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, for a class that he was in. unfortunately, Mark was high as a kite and got the reels mixed up... so the viewing audience saw the first part of the film first, the third part of the film second, the second part of the film last. there was not a single complaint from the audience. in class the next day, the students discussed the film - and there was no mention of a narrative breakdown, of a mix-up in reels. the purpose of the film remained clear for the students. each detail within the film distilled the meaning intended by the filmmakers. the narrative order was inconsequential. content did not drive form. characterization was unnecessary. plot was meaningless. meaning was present in each part of the film. each part was a whole. so there was this book, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. it dealt with passion and obsession, and the forms they take, and the meaning of those forms. it dealt with those subjects intellectually, objectively, without heat or emotion. it showed no interest in rendering its characters so that they could be understood empathetically. it left me cold. Duras began to seem rather heartless, rather cruel. but after some time, i began to recall Hiroshima Mon Amour, and what i loved about that film. i began to consider the novel again. i contemplated Duras' challenging themes. i started to admire the novel's distance, its alienation from its own topic. and so i grew to understand its frigid appeal, its sensual lack of earthy sensuality. well, what can i say: sometimes i dig a cold, smart bitch.
I feel bad giving this book a 3/5. The prose is lyrical and very experimental; I recognize this as an excellent book in style. However, in terms of the story itself... I wish I could say it matched her prose; and I wish I could say that her prose was fully developed so that the reader could at least follow her train of thought. Her style reminds me in some ways of James Joyce's, but unfortunately she is less skilled in relaying this type of disjointed stream of consciousness. I had to read paragraphs multiple times because the ideas were so random and the conversations so inchoate. Also, the crux of the story, that Lol was jilted by her fiance for a married woman, wasn't that compelling. Ok, people get dumped and become extremely depressed as a result: how could this one event have affected her life so completely and people's opinion of her so dramatically?Half the book (narrated by Jack, Tatiana and eventually Lol's lover) is about Lol's long walks, which she spends consumed by the scene of her fiance falling in love with this married woman, wondering what would have happened if things had gone differently. And, perhaps in her obsession with the past as a detached and in control observer (as one is when reflecting on the past), she begins to affect her old friend Tatiana's relationship with her lover Jack. She watches them make love from a hidden vantage and dictates to Jack what she wants from his relationship with Tatiana. Except this part is only partially explained as Jack is totally smitten with Lol and he just sort of muses about her mystery the whole book rather than elaborate on this interesting trio-dynamic more thoroughly. What compels him to follow her orders? Why doesn't he ask Lol why she is demanding so much of his affair with Tatiana? Does it in some ways alleviate the pain, and give her the power she lacked, from the last triangle she was part of? Other interesting questions remain unanswered, or even casually ignored. Tatiana says that Lol's depression (after Lol's fiance abandoned her) was not a result of Lol's heartbreak but some other factor, a lack of heart as Tatiana puts it, something that had happened long ago to make her what she was: but this too, this enormous assertion on the part of Tatiana, is never discussed or even implied by Lol. What was wrong with Lol to begin with that made her susceptible to such insanity? Why did Tatiana feel Lol was never truly human? What is it that Lol is hiding? What did Lol mean that they were "wrong about the reasons"? We never know. These questions are skirted under the guise of Lol's perverse mystery. But honestly, it doesn't seem natural not to ask. Tatiana is the only character who demands answers; one would think the narrator, Jack, who purports to love her so intensely, would be curious to find these answers as well - but no, he is not, and thus the reader is never satisfied by the hints and implications that lead nowhere. It doesn't really make that much sense and in the end you don't understand any character at all - except for maybe Tatiana, who seems like the only one resembling a human, described with more form and fluidity than the others.Altogether, a weird book. I had read The Lover, and truly adored everything about it. This was kind of disappointing.
What do You think about The Ravishing Of Lol Stein (1986)?
I would venture to suspect that this book has as-yet undiscovered profound implications for me on a personal level. I read it twice years ago, in 1989, and again in 1997. Most recently, in 2011, I found my way to an essay upon, primarily this novel, but also Marguerite Duras' and Alain Renais' 1959 movie: "Hiroshima, Mon Amour". The essay was written by Emily, and it spiraled me into a place I was unsure of, but quite curious about. I read the essay while processing what I had learned from the Kundalini Yoga Level 2 training: Authentic Relationships, and while recovering from an emotionally painful surgery. On the morning after completing the requirements to receive my certificate for my fourth Level 2 module: Lifestyles & Lifecycles, I am met with this realization:We have the capacity to heal our 'stories' and transform them profoundly into something new, something much different. Words can heal. Words can harm.I am struck, currently, at the words which I read of others about the devastation of the oceans from the Fukushima disaster and the apparent ignorance of the gravity of it, because it hasn't really affected us yet. People can forget the compassion they felt for Japan after the earthquake back in 2011, and blame the victim. I see that happening. People can entirely misunderstand the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII, and say some incredibly insensitive things, without even meaning to do so, or very well meaning to do so. People can even be unaware, and unable to enter into another's story enough, that they might be so gauche as to blame the sufferings of the Holocaust even upon it's victims, but...People can also engage in what was suggested in the text from my very 1st Kundalini Yoga Level 2 Module, Authentic Relationships: "...All this can happen with simple words. Words and Naad. If you let yourself merge into prem; if you just let yourself be selfless for a moment; if you let yourself feel the energy of that story, it can heal lifetimes ~not just what happened last week --but lifetimes, because it helps you change your story." ~p. 150 of that textAnd it was written in relationship to the practice of the Mere Man Lochai Shabd from Shabd Hazaray. Emily's essay + Duras' & Renais movie "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" + 4 KRI Level 2s beginning with Authentic Relationships = slowly slipping into prem, but not without some degree of trepidation. Changing our stories is as profound a transformation as emerging from a chrysalis.Can we all just become butterflies? Can we change our stories as some of the creative and resilient children of Hiroshima and of Auschwitz did? Those children who survived to become adults? Through boundless imagination? It is not just a gift given to the young. We can imagine. We can dream. And it can become our new reality.We can read books like "The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein" and screenplays like "Hiroshima, Mon Amour", and find a depth that can allow us to see how our own personal stories can change, can become larger than us, large enough to embrace the pain of the whole world and transform it through imagination, and a willingness to do what Emily alluded to in her essay that I read, which is to allow our memories to cease being so sharp, to allow them to transform through "frequent applications of new experience." Not to forget, really, but just to heal, and to create a new story. And I will re-read this book finally. It is time again.
—Phoenix Kaur
Not worth the read. I read it as part of the '1001 Books You Should Read in Your Life' group and finished this one having no idea why it was on the list. The writing was erratic and long winded without much really happening at all in the book. I can kind of see the whole idea of women's liberation in it when taking into account the fact that it was written in the 60's but not much was said, only vaguely implied. Lol's character was developed significantly but she is so strange and wishy washy with only the explanation of cancelled engagement. I found her reactions to everything very hard to believe. Tatiana didn't make a whole lot of sense either. She has some strange love affair going on with the narrator and is pretty certain there is something going on between Lol and him but she just chooses to largely ignore it, while Lol and Tatiana's husbands are suspicious but don't do anything about what they suspect to be their cheating wives. In what odd, cryptic parallel reality is this? I also didn't understand why the weakest and most vague of the characters was chosen to be the narrator. I choose to believe that part of the problem was in a faulty translation and since I don't speak French, I can't do much about that. However, I believe the problem had to be a lot more than the translation to come up with something this weak and ineffectual.
—Chris
Mon premier contact avec l'oeuvre de Marguerite Duras fut à travers "Le ravissement de Lol V.Stein". Un petit roman solitaire , délaissé, que je découvris en fouillant dans la bibliothèque de mes grands parents. Le titre me parut envoûtant. Et je fus conquise dès les premières lignes.. Le style d'écriture de Marguerite Duras est très hypnotisant, je trouve. C'est ce qui pourrait, en réalité, nous attacher à ses oeuvres ,jugées par la majorité des lecteurs très "ambigus", "flottants"... À mon avis, ces caractères peuvent,en effet, en faire d'excellents compagnons à toute personne espérant se détacher d'une vie quotidienne dont le rythme s'avère très accéléré..
—Imen Dridi
