If the hallmark of literary representation is that it is an unfaithful representation of the real, then perhaps the most literary texts are those that betray (disclose or let slip) that infidelity even as they indulge in it themselves.

The best they can do, it seems, is embrace their fate, fight for their own servitude.

This is a novel that is both in transit and in translation.

Art may not be able to evade death, but through performance it can be a vehicle of resurrection.

Money is, after all, one of the most powerful fictions that structure social relations.

There is a margin of uncertainty in life as in literature, and a strange resonance between the experiences of living in Communist society and engaging with a text, both of which are exercises in close reading, a hermeneutics of suspicion.

It may be nice to think we can reinvent ourselves, construct new pasts and precursors, and fiction encourages us in this fantasy. But there are scars that simply will not fade.

In rewriting the lover, Duras also rewrites herself, her origin as writer, in a precarious zone shuttling between past and future and back again.

You, of course, may take your reading of the novel in some other direction, reach your own conclusions.

It is as though Black labour existed wholly outside language altogether, or at least outside the French language.