Marguerite Duras Books

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

Featuring previously unpublished World War II-era notebooks, this collection provides a rare glimpse into the creative process of a celebrated literary figure. Readers will discover first drafts of iconic works alongside the authentic stories that inspired "The Lover, The War," revealing the evolution of her writing and the historical context that shaped her narratives.

The book features a collection of works originally published by Editions P.O.L in Paris, drawing from the themes explored in "Outside" and "Le Monde extâerieur." It presents a unique perspective on the interplay between external environments and personal experiences, showcasing the author's distinctive style and insights.

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand , her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

An unemployed immigrant and seven children live in a condemned house in a suburb of Vitry. They survive on government grants and charitable handouts. The children are not sent to school, but instead wander through the town. Then one summer the eldest, Ernesto, is given a book.

In her last book, Marguerite Duras meditates with a fierce poetic fervor on facing death, her life’s literary work, and love. Sex, and death. All of Marguerite Duras's writings are suffused with the certitude that absolute love is both necessary (sex) and impossible to achieve (death). But no book of hers embodies this idea so powerfully, so excessively, as No More (C'est Tout), the book she composed during the last year of her life until just days before her death. No More (C'est Tout) is literature shorn of all its niceties, a shout from the depths of Duras's being, celebrating life in defiance of the death she knew had already entered her immediate future. In part, it is also Duras' raucous salutation welcoming death. No More is a collection as pure as poetry and her words and ideas recirculate in hypnotic fits of lucidity, desperation, and noise, but the overall effect is both unsettling and, at times, piercingly true.

This novel is a retelling of the dramatic experiences of the author's adolescence that have shaped her life and work. It emphasizes the harsh realities of her youth in Indochina, revealing much that her earlier works concealed, from the humiliations of poverty to the sexual turmoil of adolescence.

Anna is entirely occupied with searching for her lost lover, the sailor from Gibraltar. She takes on a young man temporarily as her lover, and soon they are on a search in France and Africa. Love grows between them, but the exist in a state of suspension.

Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras's finest novels, which she also adapted to the stage.

A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs. 'We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.' Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books