Abahn Sabana David

(Paperback)

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Description

Late one evening, David and Sabana - members of a communist group - arrive at a country house where they meet Abahn, the man they've been sent to guard and eventually kill for his perceived transgressions. A fourth man arrives (also named Abahn), and throughout the night these four characters discuss existential ideas of understanding, capitalism, violence, revolution and dogs, while a gun lurks in the background the entire time. Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Duras's novel explores human existence and suffering in the confusing contemporary world.

Reviews

"Duras stands perennial and relevant, effecting and fraught. Any chance to encounter her psychological terrain is cause to awe, to be shaken out of compliant identification, comfortable desire, and to slip the frame."Douglas A. Martin ". . . [A] gripping meditation on the nature of fear, silence, and survival."Kirkus Reviews "...the book has a poetic quality that allows it to offer an eerie parable of paranoia and persecution, bigotry and fear, anti-Semitism and capitalism. Timely and timeless, it shows, among other things, how absurd and damaging it can be to live in terror, and what a 'great tiredness' one experiences, either in fearing or in doing the bidding of demagogues"Chicago Tribune "Beautifully cut to the bone yet increasingly absurdist, the narrative delivers an unsettling sense of ideology run amok. It's challenging and not always satisfying but will attract those serious about their reading"Barbara Hoffert, Reading the World "This late-vintage Duras, published in 1970 and in translation for the first time, by Kazim Ali, throbs with menace and complex questions about identity"BBC Culture

Author Bio

Marguerite Duras wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Sea Wall, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She's most well known for The Lover which received the Goncourt prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992. Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, and novelist, and has published a translation of Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri in addition to co-translating Duras's L'Amour. He teaches at Oberlin College and the University of Southern Maine.