#Marguerite duras the war trial

These war stories, a rare mixture of rage and anguish, in 1985 became La Douleur ( The War ), which contains one of the most excruciating descriptions extant of the skeletal, almost transparent human bodies who returned from the German death camps.Дuras kept these Wartime Notebooks, carefully so named, in a brown envelope in a chest of drawers.

#Marguerite duras the war trial

The other three notebooks include startling accounts of her activities, often questionable, during the war in France and in the Resistance, her participation in the trial of French collaborators at the liberation, then the return from Dachau of her husband, the French communist and philosopher Robert Antelme. I will never feel again no matter what anyone says to me'.Д«ut she was to feel again, and these Notebooks show how she interlocked fact and fiction, and how transfigured experience was the cornerstone of all her work. the raw, vivid angers of my fifteenth year. ' In the page that follows, Duras calmly dissects the more vicious beatings and verbal abuse which were her elder brother's contribution to her implacable memories and to 'the true taste of my youth. ' For Leo, her Chinese lover, would notice them and 'would never approve of Mama's attitude towards me, while I agreed with her completely, and could not have tolerated anyone criticising her. the slaps that marked my cheeks were my despair. The use of the stick I found radically shocking and unaesthetic the blows on the head, dangerous. I always agreed with Mama's reasons for beating me but not with her methods. 'Since I was the smallest of her children and the easiest to control, I was the one Mama beat the most. Nevertheless, in the Pink notebook, the original version of her brutal family life gives off a fierce stench of reality that the more romantic The Lover does not have.

Truth is indecipherable amid so much invention. Forty years later this became her most celebrated novel, The Lover, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and became an international bestseller.Дuras wrote memoir-fiction - her own life was the basis of all her creations, worked and reworked again and again. Here is Duras's earliest account of her savage childhood in Indochina and, while still an adolescent, of her affair - almost a sale into prostitution by her mother - with a rich, socially unacceptable Chinese lover. The most remarkable is the first, the Pink notebook. For this reason the publication of her Wartime Notebooks, written between 19, before she had published her first novel, is a marvellous introduction to what is best in her writing.ДЄlthough there are pieces in the Notebooks you can read nowhere else, all the ideas, themes and stories that were to make her famous begin here, as does that tightrope of anguish and eroticism that marks the Durasian universe - at once shocking, mischievous and heart-breaking. This sensibility has made her prime fodder for theoretical investigation, in the course of which her accessibility as a writer has been mightily obscured. This latter point makes her immensely easy to read: she writes audaciously about childhood, about sex, love and war, about the human heart in extremis - all the great, and popular themes.Д¬omplication sets in because Duras's near-destitute childhood in the colonial towns and coastal paddyfields of French Indochina set her on a path of intense suffering, living at such a pitch in her life and in her works that even the contemplation of a dustbin and its importance in the lives of a community of apartment dwellers seems to take on an obsessive and incantatory importance.

Elliptical always, her difference is that into the pauses, into what is not said in a Pinter play, Duras places staccato words and dialogue, sometimes repeated time and time again, a kind of echo chamber of what goes on in the minds of most human beings as they contemplate daily life. Like Pinter, Duras was a playwright and film-maker, best known perhaps for her script for Alain Resnais's 1959 milestone of French cinema, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Her clear, minimalist prose, stating and restating experience and feeling - desire, suffering, fear, passion, fury - is often akin to the writing of Harold Pinter. By Marguerite Duras, translated by Linda CoverdaleДЇrom the fevered world of intellectual literary criticism the French writer Marguerite Duras (1914-96) has suffered much.