Original language: French
Original title: The man sitting in the hallway
Year of publication: 1980
Translation: Arnau Pons Roig
Valuation: I do not know
The man sitting in the hallway, an erotic story by Marguerite Duras, describes the love encounters of a man and a woman. Such a premise, as simple as it is effective, acquires artistic invoice and conceptual opacity thanks to the author’s style, the tone that permeates the story, the choice of narrative voice and the role that the setting plays in the whole.
Duras delivers, then, a fiction with a metaphorical vocation and an abstract finish; a beautifully written fiction, dense in content and uncomfortable given its implications; a fiction full of contrasts in which desire merges with violence and the death drive.
Without a doubt, more than enjoying it, I have appreciated it. Even so, I cannot recommend it to everyone, since it seems to me that its hermeticism, its disturbing reflections and its laconic prose can frustrate most readers.
In the edition that I have read, published in Catalan by Afers, an extensive epilogue accompanies The man sitting in the hallway. In this epilogue, Arnau Pons theorizes about Duras’ story and its connection with the rest of the author’s work.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/04/marguerite-duras-el-hombre-sentado-en.html
