BOOKS

Abahn Sabana David

A novel by Marguerite Duras, Translated from the French by Kazim Ali
Open Letter Books
June 14, 2016
108 pgs , 5.5" x 8.5"
ISBN: 978-1-940953-36-6

Purchase from: Open Letter Books

From the publisher: Available for the first time in English, Abahn Sabana David is a late-career masterpiece from one of France's greatest writers. 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 calls to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett in the way it explores human existence and suffering in the confusing contemporary world.

Praise

"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