Product Description

The extraordinary pages of The War, written in 1944 but finished in 1985, form a totally new image of the heroine of The Lover and, through her, of Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. Married and living in Paris, part of a resistance network headed by Franois Mitterand, Duras is swept up in the turmoil of the period. She tells of nursing her starving husband back to life on his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who is attracted to her. The result is a book as moving as it is harrowing--perhaps Duras's finest.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295928 in Books
• Published on: 1994-08-01
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important writers, was a member of the French Resistance movement throughout the Second World War. Written in 1944 but not published until 1985, this is her compelling personal story of living in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation.

From Publishers Weekly
In Nazi-occupied France during WW II, Duras (The Lovers; Hiroshima, Mon Amour was a major figure in the Resistance. During the chaos attending the liberation of Paris in 1944 she wrote a diaryhitherto unpublished and long-forgotten by herwhich forms the opening and major segment of this short, memorable book. Here, unrevised, in vivid staccato prose that sears with its emotion, is an account of her agonized waiting at the Gare d'Orsay and elsewhere for the arrival of her husband, Robert L., who (she learned from Resistance contacts including "Morland," in actuality Francois Mitterrand), was among newly liberated POWs found in Belsen and other death camps. That Robert L. arrived home more dead than alive proved devastating to Duras; it will strike readers no less powerfully. This volume, which includes with the diary war recollections treated as stories and an account about a Gestapo agent in Paris, rates a special place among WW II memoirs.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This memoir comprises four autobiographical and two "invented" sketches set in Paris during and after the Liberation. The finest, which Duras says lay forgotten for years, dramatizes the French author's agonizing vigil for her husband Robert. When he returns from Belsen a living skeleton, she endures a struggle even more agonizing to nurse him back to life. Eventually Duras announces that she is divorcing him. "He didn't ask me my reasons for leaving. I didn't tell him what they were." Other sections detailing Duras's activities as a member of the Resistance are written in the same stark, unadorned prose that distinguished her novel The Lover ( LJ 6/1/85). Highly recommended. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Monument Not a Diary
"Memoirists who reveal turbulent pasts are faulted for exhibitionism," writes Greg Lichtenberg in his essay, "Life is also Here: Toward a Manifesto of Memoir," while those with superficially quiet lives are blamed for having no story." Marguerite Duras has a profound story to tell, whether it's exhibitionism or not. Her intent, which has a much larger scope than a memoir with the structure of a simple diary, seemes to be to humanize and personalize the wartime chaos and utter dehumanization of 1940s France under Nazi domination. She sets a record about the Holocaust. She makes a monument rather than writes a diary. This is why her memoir rises above those that Lichtenberg criticizes, those that "seem a pornography of emotions, offering up whatever excess of misery will provoke a fleeting response"; what he calls, "a talk-show between book covers." The War is crafted not written. You won't find mind-numbing cliches but only imaginative language. And the language will move you.

Very powerful, personal view of the German Occupation
This memoir is a very heartfelt testiment to love, longing, hunger, suspicion, pain and regret. It is always a treat when a writer of Duras' caliber is witness to extraordinary events and the reader is pulled along as she desperately tries to find out information about her imprisoned husband. The fact that the episodes are presented out of order is slightly disconcerting I felt in the sense that the book becomes a collection of several periods rather than a linear narrative.