We get as complete a portrait as we can hope for: the writer the world knows (“The Lover” was a global best seller) the one performing her public role (she’s very much the literary grande dame in the chatty essays in “Practicalities”) and the one at work, spurring herself on in notebooks that an editor called Duras’s “workshop, gymnasium, kitchen, treasure chest.” Why not “The Ravishing of Lol Stein,” the novel she was proudest of, I wondered, or “Blue Eyes, Black Hair,” to give a sense of her formal experimentation and sheer weirdness (it’s an entire novel more or less about a naked woman lying on a bed with a piece of black silk over her face - and it kind of works)?īut the wisdom of these choices becomes apparent.

On the face of it, it’s an idiosyncratic grouping, to put it kindly: “The Lover” (1985) “Practicalities” (1990), her riffs on alcohol, men and other forces of mayhem in her life and her posthumously published journals, “Wartime Notebooks” (2008).

When he was released, he was near death she could circle his neck with the fingers of one hand.Īnd all this before she began trying to drink herself to death.Ī selection of her books has recently been published in an Everyman’s Library edition, with an introduction by the novelist Rachel Kushner. Her husband was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. She moved to France at 17, studied law, joined the Communist Party, wrote screenplays (most famously for “Hiroshima Mon Amour”). Her mother pimped her out to a wealthy Vietnamese man when she was 14, the basis of her autobiographical novel “The Lover.” One older brother enjoyed beating her, the other creeping into her bed at night. No one endured what she had to - who among us could?ĭuras grew up desperately poor in French-occupied Indochina, sometimes hunting birds and game to survive. All these preoccupations that feel so fresh, and of this moment - anything you’d find in a book by Renee Gladman, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson - has a prototype somewhere in Duras’s work.īut still no one writes like Duras or sounds like her, because no one has lived as she did or knows what she knew. The melding of memoir and artifice called autofiction the fondness for fragments the evasive, obliquely wounded female narrator the excavations into trauma, addiction, maternity. Name a current literary trend, and the French writer Marguerite Duras almost certainly got to it first - and took it further than anyone working today.

The lover by marguerite duras