Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)
Author of The Lover
About the Author
Marguerite Duras was born in Gia-Dinh, Indochina on April 4, 1914. After attending school in Saigon, she moved to Paris, France to study law and political science. After graduation, she worked as a secretary in the French Ministry of the Colonies until 1941. During World War II, she joined the show more Resistance and published her first books. After the liberation, she became a member of the French Communist Party, and though she later resigned, she always described herself as a Marxist. Her first book, Les Impudents, was published in 1943. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 70 novels, plays, screenplays and adaptations. Her novels include The Sea Wall, The Lover, The Lover from Northern China, The War, and That's All. In 1959, she wrote her first film scenario, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and has since been involved in a number of other films, including India Song, Baxter, Vera Baxter, Le Camion (The Truck), and The Lover. She died on March 4, 1996 at the age of 81. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Marguerite Duras - Modernista
Works by Marguerite Duras
Four Novels: The Square / Moderato Cantabile / 10:30 on a Summer Night / The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (1965) 331 copies, 3 reviews
Trilogy: "The Square", "Ten-thirty on a Summer Night", " Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas" (Calderbooks) (1977) 15 copies
Oeuvres Completes in two voulmes (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) (French Edition) (2011) 10 copies
Marguerite Duras Coffret Oeuvres Completes III, IV : 1974-1995 [Bibliotheque de la Pleiade] (French Edition) (2014) 7 copies
Stilla liv 2 copies
L'Amant - Un Barrage contre le Pacifique - Moderato cantabile - Dix heures et demie du soir en été - Hiroshima mon amour - La Douleur - Emily L. (2015) 2 copies
DHIMBJA 2 copies
The Bible [short story] 1 copy
Người tình 1 copy
L'amant De La Chine Du Nord, Audio CD Lu Par Ariane Ascaride (1 CD MP3) (French Edition) (Écoutez lire) (2014) 1 copy
Los Antilopes 1 copy
Il dolore 1 copy
Caprice 1 copy
A DOR 1 copy
Maderato cantabile 1958 1 copy
India Song 1973 1 copy
Il Dolore 1 copy
Ach, Ernesto! 1 copy
O Ver©Đo de 80 1 copy
O vice-cônsul 1 copy
O AMANTE 1 copy
A dor 1 copy
Duras, Marguerite Archive 1 copy
Ruya ve Kader 1 copy
Case di scrittori 1 copy
Les Enfants 1 copy
Baxter Vera Baxter (DVD) 1 copy
Os insolentes 1 copy
Perlouses set 2x 13+14+15 1 copy
le navire 1 copy
Viết 1 copy
Pisati 1 copy
Bir Kış Günü Öğleden Sonra 1 copy
La pluie d' 1 copy
Fiche de lecture L'Amant de Marguerite Duras (Analyse littéraire de référence et résumé complet) (French Edition) (2017) 1 copy
The War Years 1 copy
Hmatatelný život 1 copy
Parkta 1 copy
עיניים כחולות שיער שחור 1 copy
Associated Works
Profil d'une oeuvre : Un barrage contre le Pacifique, 1950, Marguerite Duras (1996) — Contributor — 2 copies
10x passie-vrouwen vertellen — Contributor — 1 copy
Gefährliche Ferien - Bretagne und Atlantikküste: mit Martin Walker und vielen anderen (detebe) (2019) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Duras, Marguerite
- Legal name
- Donnadieu, Marguerite Germaine Marie
- Birthdate
- 1914-04-04
- Date of death
- 1996-03-03
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Sorbonne (1936|DES|1937)
- Occupations
- novelist
film director
screenwriter
playwright
essayist - Organizations
- French Communist Party
- Awards and honors
- Prix Goncourt (1984)
Prix Ritz Paris Hemingway (1986)
Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1989)
Prix de Mai (1958)
Prix de la Tribune de Paris (1962)
Prix Jean-Cocteau (1976) (show all 7)
Grand prix du théâtre de l'Académie française (1983) - Relationships
- Antelme, Robert (husband)
Mascolo, Dionys (husband) - Short biography
- Marguerite Duras was the pen name of Marguerite Donnadieu, born in Gia Dinh, French Indochina (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) to Marie and Henri Donnadieu, teachers from France. In 1933, she went to France for her higher education. After completing studies at the Sorbonne in political science and law, she became a member of the French Communist Party (she would later be expelled). In the late 1930s, she worked for the French Ministry of the Colonies. During World War II, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers, a de facto book-censorship system, but also was a member of the French Resistance. In 1942, for the publication of her first novel, she chose Duras as her pen name for a village where her late father's house was located. Her career as an avant-garde writer took off in the 1950s with works such as Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 1950).
She was a prolific writer of plays, novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, with many of her works marked by feelings of alienation. She returned often to the theme of love between people of different races. Her semi-autobiographical novel L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), about her youth in Indochina, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. - Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Gia Định, French Cochinchina
- Places of residence
- Gia Định, French Cochinchina (birth ∙ now Vietnam)
Paris, Île-de-France, France - Place of death
- 6e arrondissement, Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Burial location
- Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Map Location
- France
Members
Discussions
1914: Marguerite Duras - Resources and General Discussion in Literary Centennials (September 2015)
Duras: The Sea Wall in Author Theme Reads (January 2014)
1914: Duras - India Song in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - The Sailor from Gibraltar in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - Hiroshima Mon Amour in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - The Sea Wall in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
Duras: Plays and Films in Author Theme Reads (December 2013)
Marguerite Duras: General Thread in Author Theme Reads (August 2013)
Duras: The Lover in Author Theme Reads (August 2013)
Duras: The North China Lover in Author Theme Reads (July 2013)
Reviews
It only took two interlibrary loan requests, and I finally have my hands on a scannable copy of Jeanloup Sieff’s infamous portrait of Yves Saint Laurent for his Opium campaign - which is destined to be reprinted for my dining room, as I can’t quite afford the ~19k GBP price tag of an original print (even if it was currently available)! But along the way, I got to read two more lovely photography tomes, the first a monograph on the photographer and this second delving into the photography show more illustrating Yves Saint Laurent’s reign as the king of French fashion. Of course, no book can contain all of YSL’s fashion, and this one stops far short of his later years while also skating past some of his less popular work, but it is still a solid collection representing (possibly) the best of his work. Not only does it have the portrait I’ve been chasing (it shouldn’t have been *this* hard to find…), but it has classics from all the photographic greats - Helmut Newton, Avedon, and more from Sieff, among others - capturing an essential glimpse into the pictorial representation of Saint Laurent’s work. What I found maybe a bit stunning as I was reading the extremely short narrative descriptions provided alongside each illustration was how starkly his work is represented in photographs compared to the real life representations. Obviously we’re getting an even more curated than usual view, but considering that many of the photographs are presented in black and white (as per the film stock readily available and printable at the time) I was almost shocked to read how jarring the colour combinations are as described. We may see the beautiful lines of the clothing in the photographs, but with a monochrome palette it’s almost amusing to know that Saint Laurent was actually often pairing absolutely lurid colour combinations - red and pink, yellow and green, brown and shades of black. When presented on the runway, no wonder his audiences were often stunned (for good or bad effect) and then maybe mollified when the crisp and clean lines of the clothes were revealed upon further (photographically enhanced) inspection. Having mostly experienced YSL’s work in terms of house retrospectives and in black and white photographic reproductions, I’m a little bit shocked myself; not only is Yves continuing to be an inspiration, but his work continues to be a revelation as I continue my own discovery. Long may he reign! show less
O que mais me comoveu neste livro de Marguerite Duras foi tudo o que escreveu sobre a mãe e o seu desespero diário e brutal: "na minha infância a desgraça da minha mãe ocupou o lugar do sonho". Mas também o que escreveu sobre a família, em que as pessoas não se falavam e só se olhavam através das fotografias; o quarto a que chegou como a desgraça que lhe era anunciada desde de sempre; a tristeza à qual diz que poderia quase dar-lhe o seu nome; a morte do irmão a trazer-lhe uma show more dor que a fazia sentir que tudo devia morrer, incluindo ela. E comoveu-me também quando afirmou que escrever livros era a única coisa que conseguia ver para além do instante. show less
"Not for a second do I see the need to be brave. Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice."I just realized that I have not reviewed this book yet.
Part of the reason for my lapse is that there is never anything to say about war. About the Holocaust. About torture. About death.
Or rather, there is too much to say that I never know where to begin.
Besides Marguerite said it all already in this book.
Which is in itself impressive. She says it all in here without falling into the typical show more trappings of saying it all about such a subject.
Without sentimentality. In fact with the opposite of sentimentality.
"There's no point in killing him. And there's no longer any point in letting him live. ... And just because there's no point in killing him, we can go ahead and do it."She goes to the very edge of emotional experience and is somehow able to write about it almost as it was going on, and it doesn't turn out like an overly emotional teenager's drivel (I just realized after I wrote this that it may be read as a subtle criticism of Anne Frank, but it's not intended that way, I haven't read her since high school, so can't speak on that front).
Part of the reason this is impressive is that to go to the very edge of emotional experience is an entirely different beast than to write out that experience on paper. To affect a reader in that way requires going to a different place inside of oneself after much silence, quite separate from the edge of experience that is experienced while in the midst of experiencing the edge of experience.
Duras was able to do that seemingly in the moment. At the edge and not at the edge at the same time. How?
Maybe the war divides us, divides our experience, so that we can talk about the missing cheese in the same sentence as we talk about the death of a traitor (as they do in one of the later chapters here).
Death and cheese, Duras understood, normally existed on different planes of human experience. But in wartime there is only one plane of human experience. Human experience becomes one dimensional. There are no hierarchies of objects. Everything is simultaneous.
"I feel a slight regret at having failed to die while still living."show less
“Very early in my life it was too late.”
and
“Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.”
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third show more persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve not seen (Source.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old “man from Cholon” after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
“He breathes her in, the child…
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished…
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up…
I became his child.”
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert’s deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
“How can innocence be disgraced?”
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (Source.)
In 18 months, they don’t talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong “Love... in its first violence”!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras’ interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
• When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
• She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
• She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
• But she also writes that she’s “where she has to be, placed here”, which sounds like less of a choice.
• Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
“She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.”
Ambiguous Truth
“The story of my life does not exist.”
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 “that might have been taken”, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for “crucial ambiguity”. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
• “The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour” and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.”
• “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
• “When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.”
• “Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death… the mysterious death of lovers without love.”
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who’ve had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family’s acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings. show less
and
“Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.”
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third show more persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve not seen (Source.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old “man from Cholon” after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
“He breathes her in, the child…
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished…
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up…
I became his child.”
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert’s deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
“How can innocence be disgraced?”
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (Source.)
In 18 months, they don’t talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong “Love... in its first violence”!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras’ interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
• When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
• She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
• She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
• But she also writes that she’s “where she has to be, placed here”, which sounds like less of a choice.
• Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
“She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.”
Ambiguous Truth
“The story of my life does not exist.”
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 “that might have been taken”, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for “crucial ambiguity”. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
• “The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour” and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.”
• “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
• “When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.”
• “Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death… the mysterious death of lovers without love.”
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who’ve had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family’s acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 224
- Also by
- 16
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- 18,779
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- #1,162
- Rating
- 3.7
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- 368
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