MARGUERITE DURAS THE WAR FREE
MARGUERITE DURAS THE WAR WINDOWS

Despite the obvious possibilities for polemicism, The War is not an account of mortal enemies.

She is co-director of an outdoor classic film series, Films on the Haywall.Дuras also writes of her complicated acquaintanceship with the Gestapo officer who first arrested her husband. Hilary Thayer Hamann is the author of Anthropology of an American Girl. Indeed, in her introduction, she claims to have no recollection of having written it : 'When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house? I can't remember.' Her language is spare, her voice riveting. Duras describes war and its tragic consequences with heart-wrenching simplicity.

In this slender memoir of World War II, Duras shares episodes from her life in occupied Paris, where she belonged to the French Resistance under the leadership of the country's future president, Francois Mitterrand. Whenever I need to be reminded of this beautiful implausibility, I reach for my copy of Marguerite Duras' The War. The best writing does not resist, but confirms this. Everyone knows that the bonds between humans are messy and their behaviors are mystifying. Of course, in real life, it's impossible to impose a logical grid over the baffling oddities of mature existence. The master planner in me wants to know, needs to know, the 'why' of everything: love, loss, perhaps even death.

MARGUERITE DURAS THE WAR WINDOWS

The thinking goes like this: If character provides a story with architecture, then motive shores up the building, giving it substance, giving it style, supplying the walls and windows of conflict and resolution. Even if you made her up, she would just have to be French.As an author of character-driven fiction, I can spend countless hours considering motive. Reckless and defiant, here is the Marguerite of the future, ready to die rather than compromise, totally unafraid of the very worst in other people вЂ“ and willing to confront both the most sadistic and vulnerable parts of herself. This story simply rocks you on your heels. It's an unflinching depiction of a 15-year-old girl in 1930s Indo-China, bullied and outcast, regularly beaten by her debauched older brother, whose doubtful solace lay in the attentions of a much older, oddball, pock-marked Cambodian man. As if the emotional intensity of her wartime drafts and memoirs isn't enough, this rather strange volume of fragments also contains her first working of her famous book The Lover. Marguerite Duras eventually became one of France's most celebrated writers, receiving international recognition for her plays, novellas and screenplays. Duras' curse on anyone who winces at these sickening descriptions is typically combative: ' I shit on them.' She brings the passion of her life into the relationship with her reader. The story 'Did not die deported' plots Duras's agonising wait for him and the almost more appalling account of tending his emaciated body back to health. Antelme returned to Paris weighing 86 pounds and for three weeks hung between life and death. His Resistance nom de guerre was FranГ§ois Morland, better known to us as FranГ§ois Mitterrand, the recently deceased President of France. Robert Antelme was rescued from the charnel house of Dachau by a character who appears in the stories as FranГ§ois. Theodora wasn't particularly vicious, she was heartsick.'

MARGUERITE DURAS THE WAR FREE

Great events puncture its many small dramas.ДЄs the trembling suspect fearfully removes his grimy clothes, the young woman Theodora hears the advancing Free French forces: 'Outside you could hear machine guns over by the Louvre.

The stories, fragments, drafts and memoirs, which make up this compelling book, are essentially a prism of her experience in that appalling and turbulent time. Tough Theodora is a persona of Marguerite Duras, caught in the confused events of the Liberation of France in 1945.

Presiding over the torture is Theodora, a woman of chilling fanaticism, a Communist whose lover is a prisoner of the Germans. In one of the tales, 'Albert of the Capitals', a suspected Nazi collaborator, a pathetic 50-year-old man, is stripped naked in a Paris cafГ© and battered by a team of keenly sadistic Resistance youths. It is peopled by characters capable of intense bitterness, but made bearable, if not redeemed, by the arresting honesty of their creator. This collection of stories plunges fearlessly into the realities of grief and cruelty.

Marguerite duras the war