The War: A Memoir

"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 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,

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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."

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This marvelous author wrote this book based on a journal she kept during World War II, and it is powerful.

It is not comfortable reading. This book is gritty; her perceptions when she wrote the journal, like her perceptions when she put together this book, were stark, clear & nightmarish, her reactions raw, grim & terrible.

I have long liked Duras; she was a thinker as well as a writer. This is well worth the time for reading this short book.

Estou revisitando a minha sempre querida Duras por conta de um curso que estou fazendo sobre ela na Casa das Rosas e o pujante A Dor é um dos seus carros chefe.
Dividido em seis contos, dos quais quatro são autobiográficos e dois ficcionais, mas todos tendo pano de fundo a Segunda Guerra Mundial, especialmente tratando da própria presença de Duras na Resistência Francesa.
O livro começa em forma de diário contando a dor sofrida por Duras ao ter o marido enviado para um campo de concentração, a dor da espera, a dor da volta. Depois segue com o relato da perseguição que sofreu de um agente da Gestapo, o mesmo que prenderá seu marido. No conto seguinte o relato é a partir de uma sessão de interrogação (e tortura) da show more Resistência à um cidadão francês que colaborava com os nazis. O último relato ficcional se refere à um miliciano colaboracionista esperando a sorte frente ao que a Resistência faria com ele. Os dois contos ficcionais se referem a um momento pós libertação e a um momento da vida de Aurelia Steiner, personagem conhecida de Duras de outros livros e filmes.
Tudo narrado potentemente à maneira de Duras, sobretudo ao diário que dá nome ao livro.
Edição do Círculo do Livro dos anos 80, mas se preparem que a Relicário em breve o reeditará com nova tradução para sua coleção Marguerite Duras. show less

Almost immediately, I started to imagine one aspect of my review of this bk: "Anything I write about this will trivialize it. Giving this a rating will trivialize it." It begins w/ a diary of her anguish as she awaits the return of her husband, "Robert L." (Robert Anselme) from the concentration camp(s) that he's been put into after being caught as a Resistance member. The uncertainty, Has he been shot?, Has he been left in a ditch?, is maddening. The struggle for resolution, to learn about his whereabouts. Later in the bk (& earlier in the story) she describes her interactions w/ the Gestapo agent who'd arrested her husband in the 1st place. Eventually, it's her job, as a Resistance member as well, to identify this man & have him show more executed or, as it turns out, arrested & tried. Each autobiographical tale & the sparse fiction inspired by real experiences of the Resistance to Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s is stunning in its directness, in its sad educational value. Now I reckon I must read Anselme's own bk, "The Human Race" (in translation) - an outgrowth of the concentration camp experiences he barely survived. show less

Reviewed in conjunction with Roughneck by Jim Thompson


Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel ashamed of your life, every time you thought you were unlucky or that you deserve more or that you should get more. Whatever you have suffered, however genuine it be, suddenly becomes as nothing, its place clearly fixed in the universe as the measliest dot the world ever has seen. Roughneck does that. It describes a portion of his life in the pared down, straightforward way Thompson tells all his stories. Nothing is oversized, filled with extra words so that you can feel like you are getting more than you paid for. You are, of course. But not in word count.

As is so often the case, the small story about a few, packs so much more punch show more than big numbers. This one starts before the Great Depression and takes us through that period. Not that I should be calling it a story. I groaned when I realised I’d picked up an autobiography, not a novel. Live life, don’t read about others, p-llllease. But I was too mean not to read it, serves me right for not looking carefully when I bought it. And before two pages were up I was goggle-eyed, gaping-mouthed hooked.

The man’s a genius. He can even make biography bearable. I’m not going to review this, for the simple reason that I’m not worthy too. The human suffering he writes about, what Americans did to Americans, even white Americans to white Americans, would be demeaned by anything I said about it. I don’t think I ever realised so clearly the extent to which poverty and wealth create the same barriers, the same hate as race or religion, maybe even worse. Watching the way wealthy Americans treated those they were exploiting in this period made my stomach churn. I think that’s the most incredible aspect of it. It is so easy to understand poor people might hate rich. But this book brings home the other side of this and it is truly ghastly to watch.

This is a wildy entertaining book, but it is about people who were rich, watching, exploiting and being despicable to their poor neighbours. It is about people unnecessarily half starving, living in the most desperate circumstances and heart in mouth hoping they pull through. It makes you ashamed to be human.

So I thought.

But then, I hadn’t picked up La Douleur yet.

‘Shit.’ That is what I did say out loud, irritated when I picked this up, the very next book after Roughneck. Another hasty purchase, another %$^#$ autobiography. A slightly wanky one, if it comes to that, I felt as I started it – after the plain matteroffactness of Thompson, Duras seemed on the hysterically dramatic side.

Then again, who wouldn’t be? Thompson writes about the half starved. Duras writes of the 95% starved. I don’t know how to put that. People who are literally skin and bones as they come back, those few who do, from the camps of Nazi Germany, people who are so close to death that food is going to kill them as surely as lack of it will, people whose skeletons can’t bear the tiny weight on them. I have no way of describing the horrors recorded here and to quote bits and pieces would seem plain disrespectful.

I did need some pages to adjust to the girly, introspective way Duras sets out her story here, but then, it was never supposed to be a story, not like that. It was what she wrote at the time for herself, trying to hang on to what was left of her sanity as she waited for her husband to come back during the period in which the prisoners were set free from the Nazi camps. She has some moments of marvelous acidity as she describes how some of the French take advantage of the new political situation. She is no friend of de Gaulle, who sounds like a right creep the way she tells it.

It turned out that being ashamed of America in the Depression wasn’t the half of it.

Lately I seem to keep on – completely coincidentally – reading books that pair each other in some significant way and here again, it’s happened. It’s an odd request, but I’m making it. These books go together. Get them and read them back to back. It’ll be totally worth it, I promise!

Afterthought:

I went to see de Santiago Amigorena's Another silence recently and it deals, as does Duras, with the issue of revenge. What a fine contrast. The heroine, whose husband and child are murdered, sets about revenge as coldly as does Duras in the story where she talks about torturing a collaborator, but in the end, faced with the perpetrator, a piece of Argentinian trash, she not only can't kill him, but she even grants him a gesture of mercy. The difference? Maybe that in Another Silence she meets the wife and child of the killer of her family. Maybe Duras is able to torture people with the objectivity of principle because her victim doesn't look human.

Then again, maybe it is part of her own terrible guilt. It transpires that Duras - all the time she was suffering in such a melodramatic way that she confesses 'D' chastises her and points out she should be ashamed of how she is behaving - is in love with 'D' and planning to tell her husband as soon as she can, if he comes back, that she wants a divorce. No wonder she has to behave as if she is suffering all that he is, even though she can only play at that.

I don't think this detracts from the book, it simply adds a layer of human behaviour which may repel the reader, but is no less readable for that. show less

This book is the most sincere, down-to-earth account I have read concerning the events of the second world war. It's not aligned with any philosophical school, or even very concerned with style. It's just a story of human frailty and decency in occupied France that speaks to anyone on a basic level. Duras has written other memoirs including one about her role in the French resistance, but this is the least contrived and most memorable of all her books that I have seen.

No primeiro texto, Marguerite Duras espera a volta do marido que foi preso em um campo de concentração. Ela pensa em morrer, não para se juntar a ele, mas para deixar de esperá-lo.
“Adormeço junto deles todas as noites , na vala escura, junto dele morto.”
“A dor é um das coisas mais importantes da minha vida.”
“Mais tarde, contaram-me que a zeladora havia decorado a entrada para recebê-lo, e que depois arrancará tudo e, intratável, trancara-se em seu cubículo para chorar”
Depois de ver um homem de um metro e oitenta pesando trinta e oito quilos.