The novels’ snug connection between the destinies of their central protagonists and the dynamic of their narratives seems curiously at odds with the stories’ feeling of distance, a theatricalization that erodes intimacy in the telling and seduces not only through the mastery that might be appended to intimate foreknowledge, but also through the objectification, limited point of view, and proleptic hints that force the narratives to spiral through time and around and through perspectives at varying distances from the plotted action. 1 Focused on solitary and enigmatic female protagonists, the narratives reproduce the story of each woman’s life (and vice versa) as if the story were already known. Stein readers will have traversed their histories of inevitable destinies readers and characters will have returned to a rest which will have always seemed to have been the goal of the narratives’ trajectories. By the end of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat and Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol V.
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