Product Description

Published for the first time in english, the World War II notebooks of one of the twentieth century's most renowned literary figures.

For decades it has been known that Marguerite Duras had kept four notebooks in a blue closet in her country home in France. But until now no one understood the importance of the material that she had written in the period between 1943 and 1949. Here are the first drafts of her most famous works, the true stories behind The Lover, The War, and several other classics. This book is truly the seventh veil to be lifted by Duras in her multivolume autobiography. Each volume has come closer to the raw truth; here at last are the secrets that have remained hidden for all this time.

In these remarkable writings we discover the difficult, poignant circumstances of Duras's upbringing in colonial Vietnam, where her desperate mother was eager to sell her to the man who became known as "the lover." Here too is her repulsion at her first kiss and her unhappiness at this forced liaison. Once she emigrates to France, we follow her life through the war into the Liberation and the horrific events that she observed in the presence of the resistance members, who interrogated and tortured former collaborators. She also tells of the horrendous effect of finding her husband, returning nearly dead from the Nazi concentration camps. Throughout, Duras paints an unflinching picture of this troubled period.

Everyone who has been interested in Duras's life and work will find this an utterly absorbing volume. These first writings are the closest we will get to the truth of Duras's inner life and thoughts at a critical point in her career.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #277149 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This engrossing volume of newly published material from French novelist and memoirist Duras's wartime notebooks contains writing as roiled and violent as the years that produced it. Selections range from novella-length down to paragraph- or sentence-long fragments and include stories, polemics, notes and even an ad for a maid; the mix of fiction and nonfiction lets us follow characters, events and themes from Duras's autobiographical writings through various drafts into fictional form. Landmarks include her memoir of youth in Indochina in an impoverished, déclassé French family—beaten viciously by her mother and brother, then embarking on an affair with a repulsive, wealthy Vietnamese man who seems her only ticket out; this supremely rancid vision of colonial rot would become her celebrated novel The Lover. Duras's experiences in the French Resistance yield harrowing stories about the torture of a suspected collaborator, and several nonfiction pieces recount her agonizing wait for her husband's return from a German concentration camp at war's end. Even her quieter writings have an edge to them, as in a study of early morning street life in front of her apartment that sparks a meditation on class warfare. Duras's fans will recognize and thrill to her unique voice as it develops—feverish, sometimes feral, yet pitilessly unsentimental. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
French writer Duras (1914–96) survived a scarring childhood in Indochina, the subject of her novel The Lover (1984), and served valiantly in the French Resistance. A fierce and lyrical writer of conscience, Duras filled four notebooks during the war years, and they are now published in their entirety for the first time. Laboratories for future works, they are filled not with hastily scribbled outpourings or jotted-down observations but, rather, with beautifully written swathes of autobiography, drafts of novels, and stories now published for the first time. Presented with illuminating commentary, Duras’ notebooks are the wellspring for her indelible oeuvre. She reflects on the importance of preserving memory and demonstrates her gift for lyrical and searing stream-of-consciousness narration in a harrowing account of waiting for news of her missing husband, the Resistance fighter Robert Antelme. As the war churns to its terrible conclusion, she writes blazingly of religion, death, prejudice, and love. Duras is a writer of tempestuous feeling and stoicism, dissent and engagement, and every page she filled is worth reading. --Donna Seaman

About the Author
Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was one of France's most important literary figures. She is the author of such acclaimed novels as The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and The Sailor from Gibraltar, as well as the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Linda Coverdale is an award-winning translator whose most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenoz's novel Ravel. She lives in New York City.