Books like Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Not my sort of thing. Apologies to GR friends who love this book. (Though I've now noticed that some others friends' opinions of Duras' most famous book, The Lover (1984) are similar to mine about this one.)It's the mood and sparseness that I didn't like, in this archetypally French, archetypally arthouse novella of hard-to-define, emotionally and sensually charged encounters between a predominantly gay man and a straight woman - and the attraction they both have to another man. The two unnamed main characters spend most of their time 'weeping' and 'sleeping', and it was a wonder that the poor buggers didn't drown after dozing off in a lake of their own tears. There were at least a couple of ways in which I'm just not well-placed to appreciate this book. There are philosophical allusions whose presence I think I can sense, but I can't identify them. And this is the first time I've read Duras. Blue Eyes, Black Hair was written only a couple of years after The Lover, and sounds similar in style. According to other reviews, it is related to two other works: The Malady of Death - of which it is a sort of reworking - and La Pute de la côte normande, an essay about writing Blue Eyes, Black Hair which doesn't seem to be available in English. (Though if it were online, it's short enough that it could be read it by sticking paragraphs of it into Google Translate.) Blue Eyes, Black Hair is one of these translated novellas which feels like it's set in rooms with almost no furniture, in which people make semi-abstract utterances. It's a category of book which I've often found myself reading in the last few years via the criteria: ARC or library find + eligible for next year's International Booker + very short. These books nearly always leave me wishing I could have spent the time reading something else, unless the title is longlisted. (This one, instead, allows me to tick off an item on a reading list from a 28-year old song.) It's a style I hoped and expected to get away from if reading classics. But stumbling on a 1980s equivalent by a canonical author like Duras at least helps in understanding the roots of this sort of thing - and those books are most frequently translated from French. Blue Eyes, Black Hair is, to be fair, a good deal more complex than most of those brittle, newly-translated novellas. To the pared-down, moody and existential nouveau roman it adds the reflexive knowingness of 1980s metafiction, with extra layers involving a stage version of the story which is both discussed and 'acted' at intervals through the novella. The characters have intricate relationships to one another and their knowledge or lack of knowledge of this is only gradually revealed. The dynamics are messy and ambiguous, with periodic interactions that seem by current standards toxic or mutually abusive, or where one is by turns pressurising the other in some way. Though much of the time they have a sort of solidarity in being very upset and romantically over-wrought. Another relationship the woman is involved in also has dubious dimensions: abusive? Or non-scene BDSM where people have never really read about rules and are following their instincts? Blue Eyes, Black Hair was written and published in 1986; if there is any reference to the AIDS crisis that was just breaking, it's not immediately obvious, but there is probably room for interpretation, given how much sorrow there is in the book. In an unedifying, unartistic way, I frequently found this book exasperating , and was glad I didn't read it when I was younger, because of the way it makes all its upset and drama and provocative mysterious seem so very desirable and interesting - when in actuality most people are alienated by that stuff. I didn't need *even more* boosting of that kind of thing. The two main characters are, at least, only twenty, which is probably, by the standards of older people, still within the allowable zone for what a friend of mine, when we were in our late twenties, described as "behaving like a teenage goth". Whilst I didn't experience the exact situation, there is a mood captured so well here that I felt that this book would have been a perfect present for someone I knew nearly a decade and a half ago, and who was almost impossible to buy for. I came to admire Duras for having such patience, openness and empathy to write about this youthful melodrama when she herself was in her seventies, even if I didn't relish reading about it. [Thanks to a link in another review, I've just found out that she actually had a tempestuous relationship with a young gay male assistant when she was in her seventies, so this book wasn't quite based on mature contemplation of the past.]A curious mix-up: Contemplating my reading lists based on a couple of songs from the wilfully pretentious side of early 90s indie, I had googled the French quote from the lesser-known track, 'Bluestocking' by Momus, which I don't think I'd ever done before, and it was clearly from Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs. After I'd read the book, I found an old blog post in which the artist himself had said it was from The Lover. Wrong book? Right book? probably both are made so by this footnote. Blue Eyes, Black Hair hasn't made me overly keen to read more Duras, though at least most of her works are very short.(read & reviewed September 2019)