Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras (1998)

It's taken me several days to read this book, and not just because it's almost one thousand pages long. For anyone with more than a passing interest in Marguerite Duras's life and work, it needs to be read carefully: this must be the definive biographical work on her. While not exactly a friend of hers, Laure Adler had many contacts with her, as well as being able to interview such important people in Duras's life as Yann Andréa, Monique Anthelme, Robert Gallimard, Jérôme Lindon, Dionys Mascolo, François Mitterrand, and many more.

Although not a critical biography, this tome gives summaries of all of Duras's books and films and gives some details of how they came from her life: Duras was no enthusiast for biographies, and when Adler asked if she minded her writing such a book, gestured to those she'd written, as if she'd already provided enough biographical details.

To Duras, writing is an elucidation of herself, a search for the truth in its different aspects. For example, she made three versions of the story of her Chinese lover in Indochina, and although both Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) makes her mother appear as something like Duras's pimp, she and her opium-smoking brother both come out in a more positive light in her Goncourt-winning L'Amant (1984).

Although opium wasn't Duras's drug of course, she was a chronic alcoholic and underwent a few detoxes, the 1982 one (when she was sixty-eight) being astonishing: after drinking up to a phenomenal six to eight litres of cheap wine a day, she was rushed to the Hôpital américain de Paris in Neuilly and very nearly didn't survive. Considering that Duras went on after this episode to produce some of her most ineresting works is also phenomenal. As Adler notes elsewhere, and I translate: 'On her body she knitted a second skin of words which prevented her from dying.' What a beautiful image.

I could go on from many more words about this superb book, and haven't even mentioned her two husbands Robert Anthelme and Dionys Mascolo or her fascinating sixteen-year life with the gay and very much younger Yann Andréa, but I intend to read many more works by Marguerite Duras, as I've obviously been neglecting an important author.

My Marguerite Duras posts:
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Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul

Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Vie tranquille
Marguerite Duras: La Pluie d'été