Abahn Sabana David

by Marguerite Duras, Kazim Ali (Translator)

"Duras's language and writing shine like crystals."—The New Yorker

"A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of her powers."—Edmund White

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.

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. This is her third book to be published by Open Letter.

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.

Genres: Fiction, France, Literary Fiction, Literature, Classics

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, (4 April 1914 -3 March 1996) known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker.

Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca]

DNF even though it is short and I like Marguerite Duras’s work. I bought this at a library discard sale. But I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t feel any tension developing or any real development of the characters even though I gave it about 40 pages. Since I did not finish it, I did not give it a rating.

The story is set in a future, apparently communist, dystopia in which Jews are still persecuted. A woman (Sabana) and a young man (David) arrive at the house of Jew, named Abahn, to guard him until a kind of “mob boss” named Gringo arrives to kill him. Gringo says all the local merchants want Abahn killed. Meanwhile another Jew, also named Abahn, arrives to wait with them.

The entire 110 pages are essentially dialog spoken in a few words or less. It reminds me of Waiting for Godot. I did not read far enough to understand what the significance might be of having both of the Jewish men have the same name. And there is some obvious symbolism I did not catch in that David, the man with the gun, is blind. If you read it, this is a typical section of what you will be reading: (I left out quotation marks in the following.)

They are silent. Again Abahn gestures toward the Jew:
He’s unsure now. That’s what I think.
David thinks.
It’s completely normal for Gringo to kill him.
Normal, says Abahn.
David lowers his voice a little:
He’s Gringo’s enemy.
He’s a different kind of man says Abahn. He’s a communist who believes that communism is impossible. And Gringo thinks it is.
David smiles as if at a joke. He hesitates.
Yes, definitely, he says.
Which? Abahn asks.
David stops smiling. He looks toward Sabana. He wants her help. She is silent.
You don’t know, says Abahn. We don’t know.
They are silent. Again Abahn gestures towards the Jew:
He doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble to kill Gringo.
He thinks Gringo is dead, says Sabana.
What? How? cries David.
No one answers him.
It’s completely normal that Gringo would kill him, says David again, his voice trembling.
Yes. Gringo, says Sabana.
David stares at Sabana in terror, seized by brutal shock.
He waits. Sabana says no more. His terror grows.
The life of the Jew is unseeable, invisible. Says Abahn. Like the life of David.
His terror still grows. Silence falls.



Duras wrote many novels. I really enjoyed her novels The Sea Wall and Emily L.

Photo of the author from thebaffler.com

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brief novel, published in its original French in 1970, has only recently been translated. Having read other Marguerite Duras books in French, I can imagine how difficult the translation must have been. It conveys much of the density and intensity of her writing. Superficially seemingly simple, yet the story is highly complex, requiring a very subtle nuanced language.

Set in a house near a large cemetery and woods, at the outskirts of a fictional town, called Staadt, we spend one night with the three central characters of the title. But then there are more voices in the tense exchanges, with silences as crucial for the interactions as the words. Relationships are in flux... And there are outside events centred on a character, Gringo that have led to the encounter in the House and influence the words and the atmosphere.

Underlying themes evolve throughout the night. Concepts like 'freedom', 'justice', 'identity', are touched upon. The prominent concept of the 'other', the outsider, 'the wandering Jew', here exemplified by Abahn, the Jew, stands in the room like another character. He is the counterpart to Gringo, the strongman beyond the House.

Duras's language is spare, yet the characters' movements and verbal and nonverbal expressions are described in great detail. Her style creates a mounting level of tension and the reader can become
totally captivated. I was. I was reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's dense and provocative play No Exit, mostly for the atmosphere created. Duras's short text should provoke similar intense debates as Sartre's did in its time.

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

marguerite duras's 1970 novel, abahn sabana david, has the endless, indeterminate expectation of beckett's waiting for godot and something resembling the ever-heightening tension and dread of ariel dorfman's death and the maiden. the french writer's three titular characters (and, later, a fourth) spend a surreal evening discussing history and politics, whiling away the twilight hours in anticipation of the (imminent) arrival of the oft-mentioned gringo and his murderous, genocidal promise. duras's novel is composed mostly of terse prose and constant foreboding, with repetition working to great effect. enigmatic and existential, abahn sabana david is as fascinating as it is frustrating, with its intended omissions lending the tale an air of eerie, chilling mystery and, ultimately, consequence.

again the cry of a dog. in the field. a strange cry, a strangled bark, a whine.

*rendered from the french by author and translator kazim ali (duras's l'amour, et al.)

[Amirsaman · Rating 2 out of 5]

یک نمایشنامه‌ی دوراسی، با پس‌زمینه‌ی جنگ جهانی دوم، کمونیست‌های سرخورده، شخصیت‌هایی که حتا برای خودشان هم معلوم نیست چرا می‌جنگند یا عضو این گروه و مخالف آن یکی شده‌اند. و شخصیت‌هایی که جایشان با هم عوض می‌شود و دیالوگ‌های مبهمی که --بقول یکی از ریویونویسان-- یادآورِ در انتظارِ گودو است.

[Letterrausch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kommunismus blabla Juden blabla Hunde blabla Gringo blabla ...

Es passiert mir selten, aber ich habe absolut keinen Schimmer, was ich hier gerade gelesen habe.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

“You didn’t want anything?”
“I didn’t want anything. I wanted everything.”
Silence.
“And tonight?”
“Everything. Nothing.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if it was the fact that this is just not the sort of thing I normally read, the translation or what, but I spent most of my time confused. In fact, I finished the book just to see if the ending would make the rest of it clearer. I'm still pretty confused, but I suppose it did make me think. I'm unsure if it was an allegory for the struggle between the physical world and the metaphysical, communism versus consumerism, politics versus religion or all of the above. I think that the characters were fighting over David's soul or belief system, but, again, that's just what I took away and I am in no way indicating that I understood . . . anything that happened really. I'm rating this 3 stars due to confusion - I don't want to indicate that it's good or that it's bad because it just wasn't for me.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sparely arranged and plotted, a single-scene stage play for four, two characters sent to kill another for political reasons and a philosophic interloper in endlessly revolving oblique conversation. As with much great Duras, this is roiling beneath a placid surface -- desperation, madness, despair. Perhaps in staged form, rather than novel arrangement here, these aspects would become more present and forceful, instead, here, they're specters haunting an oddly detached text that only seems willing to circle around its points of greatest relevance. I'm giving this two stars as one of the slighter Duras novels I've encounter but don't be deterred. She's always entirely worthwhile.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, as in more than one of Duras's later novels, this one simultaneously does something quite original and therefore remarkable, while also failing utterly to be what, by pretty much any conceivable aesthetic standard could be called good. In this way the novel more or less cancels itself out.

The situation and stripped down dialogue, just the naked originality of the thing, a kind of racial/political hard-boiled fairy tale in which no one ever speaks even remotely like actual human beings speak, is so novel I want to applaud its daring, love it for not being even remotely like any other novel ever written. Yet the repeatedly broad melodramatic gestures and general phoniness of the whole thing--and having to read the word Jew like 10,000 times over the course of 108 pages--is just unbearable. So weird. I'm glad it exists, but I bet I never return to reread it.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duras working in her L'Amour mode, stripped down as a play. Not a late career masterpiece, more a mid-career sustaining of brilliance.

[Rainy · Rating 4 out of 5]

نگاه به جهان پساجنگ به شیوه ی دوراس دلچسب و منحصر به فرد👌

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review for the Chicago Tribune:

If you read only one book by the renowned French writer Marguerite Duras, then it should probably be her 1984 Prix Goncourt-winning autobiographical novel "The Lover," an unparalleled masterpiece of cruelty and longing, written in a dreamy and spare-yet-effulgent style. But why would you read only one? Especially when she wrote a few dozen. "The Lover" was actually her 48th work.

One reason might be that not all of her material has made its way into translation. Luckily, the poet, novelist, professor and translator Kazim Ali and the publishing house Open Letter are doing their parts to remedy that lack, having just released Duras' 1970 novel "Abahn Sabana David" for the first time in English.

Based at the University of Rochester and dedicated to putting out 10 translated titles annually, the nonprofit press Open Letter is one of relatively few publishers dedicated, as they say, "to increasing access to world literature for English readers," particularly "works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow."

Time will tell if "Abahn Sabana David" will prove enduring enough to be a classic, but at present, it's certainly stimulating, thought-provoking, and a welcome addition for Duras fans who can't read her in the original French.

Short, sophisticated, and exemplifying the pared-down quality of much of Duras' work, "Abahn Sabana David's" plot unspools in just 108 pages, following two communists, David and Sabana, who show up one night at a country house under orders from their brutal leader, Gringo, to find Abahn — or as Sabana puts it, "the one they call the Jew" — a man they've been sent to guard and eventually kill for his alleged crimes.

Driven by dialogue, the novel uses repetition and terseness in its characters' speech to permeate its scenes with a sense of inescapable political and personal menace. As the operatives explain to their victim the reason for their arrival, Duras writes:

"The Jew does not answer. Sabana speaks: '"The merchants police aren't out tonight. Gringo made a deal with the merchants. They told him, 'If you let us sell to the Greeks then we'll give you Abahn the Jew.' Gringo agreed. The police sleep tonight. The town is Gringo's'."

Ali, who also translated Duras' short novel "L'Amour" for Open Letter, does a skillful job conveying the unease of this story, as well as the starkness and aridity of its diction and syntax. Several images recur to build Duras' motifs of violence and those responsible for carrying it out, including "the muted barking of dogs, their growls rising," specifically "the dogs of the killing fields" where, Sabana says, the dead could number as many as 20 million. So too do characters fall blind, deaf or asleep at random intervals, and Duras emphasizes how frequently, "They are all silent, separate from one another," as if to criticize the ways in which coercive ideological and economic forces pit individuals against one another.

Duras, who died in 1996 at the age of 81, was known for such strangeness and experimentation in her prose. Like her fellow Nouveau Roman — or "new novel" — movement authors, she began, in the 1950s, to reject the traditional novel as an inadequate form to depict the morally muddled post-war world, and her disquieting sensibility is on full display here.

Bleak and haunting, flat and choppy, this novel resembles someone wearing an outfit that borders on a costume rather than merely clothes; in other words, it is aggressively, almost confrontationally stylish. As such, the book runs the risk of some readers liking it and others being put off, but it's a risk worth taking.

The tale is riddled with deliberate gaps and omissions and an emphasis on subtext and what is left unsaid, a technique which invites readers to step in and think for themselves.

In its severity and coldness, 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.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually LOVE Duras but this one was just vague and detached.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the beauty of the language and the brevity of the book, I found Abahn, Sabana, David to be tedious. A number of reviews compare the novel to Beckett's plays, and the spareness of the setting and small span of emotional range are apt comparisons. But, for me, the dialogue in Duras's novel sounds like Beckett on steroids (not quite chatty but close), minus the humor. The moral drama--will the Jew(s) be killed?--turns into a cynical hope that *all* of the characters will please just disappear. Not as good as L'Amour by a long shot.

[Nate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Avant-garde, experimental, stream of conscious dialogue that felt blurry and ambiguous, and more like a play than a novella.

Even the promotional advertisement that came with my book mentioned how you aren't really sure who of the few characters is talking, nor are you certain whom they are talking to.

I'm glad it was translated, but this type of work is very difficult for me to appreciate.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating is not reflective of the quality of the writing, the inherent craft of its creation (translated), or its artfulness, or its possible importance in the author's work - all of which could be argued. I just did not enjoy it. (In the same way one can respect some recognized painters, but not particularly like their work, personally).

[Anwen Hayward · Rating 2 out of 5]

"He said, 'Look here, leave it all, you're building on ruins.'"

This is like a well-written postcard to a distant relative, in that I don't think it actually says anywhere near as much as it thinks it does, but it says it very nicely. A staging of this as a play might work a lot better than the novella, because it's about 90% dialogue and 10% stage direction (she moved here, he did this, she moved there) and there's not a lot of visuals. It also does that really, really annoying thing that a lot of Beckett-esque texts do, which is having characters repeat themselves multiple times to make sure that you know that what they're saying is important or foreshadowing.

I have to admit that I have no real idea what this book is about. It's completely and deliberately inaccessible. It's anti-communist (or at least anti-soviet), that much I can tell, but I'm not entirely sure why; something about individuality and labour. It uses Jewishness and Jewish identity in a very odd way for an author who is not Jewish, and uses the iconography of Auschwitz to represent a greater and more universal sense of not-belonging, which I found a bit iffy. Duras is clearly an author who doesn't shy away from things that people might find a bit iffy, but I honestly don't think that Auschwitz imagery like this is particularly successful because it is so far removed from any experiences that the vast majority of us will ever have or be exposed to. Saying that 'we are all from Auschstaadt' doesn't actually mean as much as Duras might think it does, because none of us knows what being from or at Auschwitz would have been like or would have done to a person. Although, perhaps the inaccessibility of that experience is somehow linked to the inaccessibility of this book as a whole. I don't know. I'd have to reread the book to get a better insight into that, and honestly, I have no real intention of doing that. Reading it once was confusing enough.

A further edit would not have gone amiss, as there were several errors in the text. I can look past that ordinarily, but in a text which is already almost impossible to understand and needs very careful reading, the mistakes stand out more, because you do need to focus on absorbing every word and letter, and they are also twice as irksome, because they impede the understanding of an already oblique text. A special mention should probably go to the translator here, as I can imagine that a text as simultaneously dense and delicate as this one would have been a real challenge.

If you like books that are entirely evasive and require multiple readings to penetrate the various layers therein, or if you're a huge fan of Beckett and need your fix of texts in that vein, then go ahead and read this one. If you don't fit into those two niches - which I clearly do not - then do yourself a favour and just don't.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abahn Sabana David is an anomaly of a book review for me since normally I don't identify whether I have started and ended a book on the same day. However, both Marguerite Duras and her translator from the French Kazim Ali (je ne parle pas français and that phrase has gotten me through twenty-six years of international relations) effectively swept me through their 108-page whirlwind of a tale in the Staadt.

When I looked up what a gringo was, I got code-switching, and that is something that the linguists were really, really into at the university. Maybe I should like this book better than I did since I looked that up years ago or have been able to have read it in French. But neither of the things I mentioned before happened since I had forgotten.

The reason I did not give it a five out of five is that there were some parts that were more difficult to accept.

I thought this author had an unmistakable fixation on canines much like some of my other friends I see running around town with their dogs who need the exercise. This is really not a cat book, but a dog book. My cat Cora loved it anyway, she keeps mrowling in satisfaction with how it wrapped up. My other cat Tilly hated it, but she's can't stand dogs and even scratches me sometimes, too. My bird Oliver thought it was a good book, but he is a good-natured sort who likes everything that doesn't attack him.

I liked this book, and you might, too.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is unlike other Marguerite Duras novel so I have read, and I would describe it as of a genre that mixes Kafka and Beckett. I found it baffling at first, then interesting while still baffling, and finally interesting and understandable. It is quite brief and quick to read, and it is thought provoking. It has to do with an old Jewish man who is "visited" by a woman and a man who have come to visit him in order to do him harm. Part way through the book another Jewish man joins the first three characters. All through the book there are references to a major, and threatening, fifth character, and a smaller role of a marginal sixth character.

[Ferris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this novella was an experience akin to reading "Waiting For Godot". I was left feeling confused and disturbed, with only two certainties. The world is full of chaos and uncertainty, and communication is everything. The plot, as nearly as I could make out, was about assassins sent by the Communist party to execute a Jew who had discussed the concept of freedom with one of their members. Duras is a master of language and intentional prose. I do not think she misplaces a single word. Powerful, difficult to decipher and to take emotionally, and remarkable in its impact!

[Julia Holcomb]

Something about fear, something about dogs, something about Jews, something about the darkened park, something about silence, something about nothing.

I’m not sure if I really even read this. After about 50 pages I just started skimming it. It didn’t really make any sense to me - the dialogue was hard to follow (who is speaking?) and half of the time the characters seem to be saying a whole lot of nothing.

The description sounded interesting, but I spent every page in confusion and frustration. Perhaps I should’ve chosen a different Duras work to be my first.

[MVC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Samuel Beckett type fever dream in response to the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. There is commentary to be found on labor, antisemitism, and communism, though it’s all pretty abstract. As the four characters wait for the ambiguous Gringo, it reminds me of “Waiting for Godot,” but lacks some of the fantastical nature of Beckett’s work. Definitely appreciated it though.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

Duras at her absolute worst. Around this time, Roland Barthes complained to her that he wished she'd go back to the charming descriptive prose of her early period. She snubbed him but eventually followed his advice when she wrote her best novel, The Lover.

[Kristina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Haven’t enjoyed this book, I’m sure it is better written in French. Too messy, confusing and abrupt.

[S_k_]

“The silence grows. It blinds. It sharpens to a peak. Spreads out. Spreads to the chink in the wall of slumber, a dull stone, a clamour, brief and strange.”

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like an avant garde play. Had enough of that in college.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I probably didn’t understand the point of the book but it felt confused and there was no tension at all until like the final 10 pages?

[Baz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short, play-like novel, written in Duras’s clean spare prose, was the perfect next thing to read after Pynchon. It wasn’t any easier or less dense than a Pynchon novel, but that wasn’t a problem for me. I was drawn to the abstraction, and fascinated by the form, the heavy minimalism, the silences and repetitions, the broken-down language.

I liked the cool metaphysical tone and the ambience surrounding the characters in their one night together in the front room of a village house, whose window overlooks a countryside landscape of darkness and snow. Their time together is often punctuated by the sounds of gunshots in the distance and dogs barking.

It’s mostly written in dialogue. It reminded me of Don DeLillo—specifically The Silence, which is also deeply atmospheric and full of tense, stylized dialogue: characters speaking in fragments and ideas in a room where darkness and silence and unanswered questions loom thick. T’was unsettling.

This was verrry different from The Lover. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I enjoyed The Lover, but I’m more intrigued by Duras than ever, and am keen to read more.

[Adi Khera · Rating 3 out of 5]

An "interesting" cinematic novel. The piece reads more like a film script with fleshed-out dialogue and detailed descriptions of movement for the four characters. The political nature of the novel, while interesting felt difficult to course through while the characters moved in and out of blindness and deafness. The Satre-esque world of existentialism Duras creates feels flat in text, perhaps it's more appealing in the film companion of the piece.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dig Marguerite Duras. She's both spare (prose) and dense (content), both obvious (two Jews named Abahn) and obscure (recurring discussions of dogs). In this late career novella, she gives us a surreal visit from the younger Sabana and David to the home of the Jew (Abahn #1). They have apparently come to either kill or hold Abahn to be killed by the unnamed "Gringo." Then Abahn number two arrives and what ensues is a coded examination of motives, histories and allegiances that takes the quartet through the wee hours of the morning to an unexpected - and nearly inexplicable - ending. Duras was a master of the open secret - she gives you all you need to know to figure out her puzzle, but the clues aren't in plain sight and the meaning you find in it may be all your own. I'll be turning this one over in my mind for some time to come - and that's as it should be.