SOURCE: "A Man, a Woman and a Voyeur," in The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1992, p. 12.

Below, Danto reviews Duras' novella The Man Sitting in the Corridor and compares it to her earlier novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein.

In The Ravishing of Lol Stein, a 1964 novel with which Marguerite Duras began to skirt the celebrity she would encounter exponentially 20 years later with The Lover, the protagonist is a woman whose resilientmemory of lost love festers into a form of insanity. The narrative moves from before, when Lol Stein is young and borne by love, to after, when she is older, spent by residual grief and mad. In the last state, Lol Stein returns to roam the scene of her youthful tryst, a village in Normandy, where she sees a man with a woman who resembles her onetime rival. Later Lol Stein lies in a field from...