Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1285751 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Duras (1914-1995) is a figure of continuing interest to Francophiles, readers interested in women's writing and devotees of modern films like Hiroshima mon amour. With verve and poignancy, this bestselling 1998 French biography (available for the first time in English) reveals Duras as an intellectual diva and difficult woman pursued by the ghosts of her past and a lifelong call to write. Historian and journalist Adler is able to present this complex picture through her extensive use of intimate sources (including Duras's son Jean and his father, Dionys), as well as her understanding of the high drama of Duras's life. From her childhood in colonial Indochina to her involvement in the Resistance and the development of French postwar cinema and literature, Duras (born Marguerite Donnadieu) was at the center of 20th-century French history; Adler balances her subject and her times with a familiarity that draws readers in and makes reading particularly pleasurable. Moreover, Adler interweaves her discussion of Duras's writing with her lifeAand how each influenced the other. For example, on lover Dionys's infidelity, Adler writes, "Like all women, Marguerite knew the man she was living with was being unfaithful. Like all women, she knew even though she didn't want to know," a situation that is mirrored by Duras in her work The Little Horses of Tarquinia. Similarly, details of Duras's happy young motherhood and even her dark last years reveal her humanity and make this biography as much a tale of a person as of a cultural icon. Duras once said of herself, "I'm not sure I could put up with Duras"; readers may find themselves agreeing halfway through the book, but that won't stop them from reading to the end anywayAto catch all the jewels Adler strews in their path. The book's cover, with a photo of Duras, beautiful and luminous, will inflame readers' attention. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
Duras (1914-1996) lived an exemplary twentieth-century life: from French-colonial Indochina to wartime Paris; from the Communist Party to the riots of May, 1968; from an adolescent affair with a wealthy patron to a lasting relationship with a homosexual man some forty years her junior. She transfigured these experiences into gaunt, poetic fictions, many of which she couched in essaylike meditations on the struggle to produce them. Though Adler interviewed Duras herself at length and had access to her private papers, this admiring but unflinching biography is based largely on remarkably frank interviews with longtime intimates of Duras after her death. The biographer's evidence of her subject's manipulations of fact in her fictions makes for a not unpleasant sense of illicit insight. Even for readers unfamiliar with the novels in question, the stories that Adler carefully reconstructs––particularly Duras's high-wire wartime dalliance with a Gestapo agent and her fight for literary recognition through years of sexual obsession and alcoholic haze––are as gripping as the works they inspired.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Duras was formidable. A passionate, prolific, and courageous French writer and filmmaker known best in the U.S. for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and The Lover (1984), she lived a life as complex and controversial as her work. Adler, a journalist and historian, knew Duras, and her accounts of their conversations enrich her incisive, insightful, and compelling portrait. Born in 1914 in what was then called Indo-China, Duras was forever haunted by the lush beauty of the landscape and the ugliness of her impoverished and traumatic childhood. Adler unveils the long-concealed truth about Duras' involvement with the mysterious Chinese lover she wrote so enigmatically about, the relationship that awakened her "extraordinary powers of seduction" both in person and on the page. For Duras, who was as beautiful as she was brilliant, as narcissistic as she was socially aware, the need to write was as powerful as the need for sex, and she practiced both with voracity, daring, and skill. Adler dramatically chronicles Duras' exploits as a member of the Resistance, her love affairs and love for her son, the awe-inspiring intensity of her writing and filmmaking, and, on the dark side, her alcoholism, megalomania, and persistent sense of "inner exile." Duras wrote to "convey the sound of the soul," and her gifted biographer creates a vivid context for that indelible voice. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

shedding light on the shadows?
Laure Adler has written a biography of Ms. Duras that is both compelling and confounding, and although I appreciated her considerable efforts, I finished the book probably "knowing" less about Duras than when I started.

No doubt this can be somewhat attributed to the contradictions that appear to have been a staple of Duras's life and conscience. If Ms. Adler is to be believed, Duras was the most conflicted and Protean artist of the 20th century, forever shape-shifting and believing opposites at once. For every bit of evidence Ms. Adler offers about Duras being X, she offers (at least) a Y and Z stating almost the exact opposite proposition. So I constantly found myself asking, Was she X, Y, or Z?

If she was indeed all three, then I would like the biographer to step in and make some comment to sum up the disparate parts. Rarely, if ever, does Ms. Adler see this as her function. She faithfully details the facts of Duras's life and works, but she (almost) never comments or crystallizes them. We are told on the dust jacket that Ms. Adler has been trained as an historian and as a journalist, and it is decidedly the latter profession that seems to dominate her scrutinization of Duras. Plenty of facts are offered. There is plenty of thesis and antithesis depicted, but we never seem to attain any synthesis, leaving us in the world of reportage rather than biography.

Adler does triumph in her depiction of postwar Paris in the forties and fifties. Here, she is fully in historical mode and offers readers fascinating insight into the personalities and politics of the time. Rarely have I seen such an enlightened discussion of the artistic and political Zeitgeist of that particular era. The cast of characters and their interactions are well defined and amusingly recounted. If only the remainder of the book had been so incisive.

As a feminist--or at least I would suppose she is, given that she has written a number of histories of women--Ms. Adler should be chided for her somewhat myopic concentration on Duras. One criticism that feminists constantly leveled against male biographers in the 70s and 80s was that they only chose other males as their subjects and, once chosen, only unearthed their connections to other males--and their power games, professional lifes, etc., thereby giving short shrift to personal relationships with wifes, lovers, families, etc. Here Adler discusses at length Duras's relationship with her mother, which was indeed a pivotal one, as borne out in her books and films. However, Adler fails to adequately explain the motivations or even the emotions of the males around Duras. Considering that Duras started a long-term affair with another man (Mascolo) while her husband (Anthelme) was in a concentration camp, and then kept the affair going for years afterward while the men became best of friends, we learn startingly little about how these men felt about this fact or how they accommodated it into their lives. Later on, Ms. Adler talks of Duras's relationship with her son, but this discussion is mainly held to one chapter that investigates their lives while her son was a boy. We rarely learn how the two got along as adults, which strikes me as an omission, given that it must be of some interest how the son of a major artist would respond to a mother who was so adored and reviled in her own lifetime--and who must have been difficult to live with, as an artist, an alcoholic, and a woman who self-defined around the substantial number of men who occupied important places in her sexual and intellectual lives.

In sum, I enjoyed the book and think that Ms. Adler has done some very impressive work. At the same time, given the access she received to personal materials from major players in Duras's life--including her husbands--she could have done so much more if she had expanded her vision and chose to move beyond mere journalism. If you want to know various facts of Duras's life, you may well enjoy this biography. If you want to walk away from the book with a definitive sense of who Duras was--if you want to draw back the curatin and let some new light in--perhaps you should go elsewhere. Duras, we find in this biography, was a woman of many parts. Unfortunately, Ms. Adler does not give us an adequate picture of what she was as a whole. In the end, extensive reading of Duras's work may provide a better sense of who she was, despite all her trickery and deceit, than this biography could hope to accomplish.

Coming Closer to the Mystery That Is Duras
Laure Adler's book comes close, but no book will ever come close enough. Duras' fans will undoubtedly read anything written about her, so anxious are they for shimmers of truth regarding the woman who left such a perplexing legacy of literature. Adler's biography of the fascinating French writer is good and it is certainly much more revealing than say, Alain Vircondolet's DURAS which might be more of a pleasure to read (he took Duras up on a challenge to try and write as she did), but says far less about the woman.

There are times when Adler's sentence structure seems choppy, and this may be hard for more sophisticated readers, but bear in mind that although Anne-Marie Glasheen seems to have made a suitable translation, translations can be difficult and something is almost always lost.

The emphasis here should really be on content and Adler did a fair job considering the difficulty in separating the real Duras from the invented one. For those looking merely for facts, Adler clears up the myth around THE LOVER, does a superb job of showing Duras through the war years, and gives a reasonable look at her friendship with Mitterand. One will miss an in-depth report on her relations with her family and will undoubtedly want to know more - especially about the elusive younger brother. As we read we become struck by the presence of men in Duras' life, and we yearn a bit for insights from a close woman friend. Unfortunately, Duras did not seem to allow many women into her life.

Adler's book is recommended for any fan of Duras' literature as it will at least give some insight - possibly new - into her working mind. But don't expect miracles. And expect more books forthcoming. Duras' son, Outa, is a rather silent voice in this book and one can't help but think that there is part of Marguerite alive in the world who has not yet spoken (written) his thoughts.

This is not a biography
The only reason I finished reading this book was because I'd not read any about Duras.

The writing is so stunningly bad that I had to control my anger as I read (melodramtic repetitions, little fragments that figure in soap opera, so on) because I was still curious about Duras and thought I might learn something. The translation is as awful as the text. (I'll save you examples.)

This is not a biography. It's a badly written travelogue of a literary and political career. Duras constructed an amazing life and I look forward to a biography that might open that up.

This piece of dribble is worthless.