Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents (1943)

Les Impudents is Marguerite Duras's first novel, one she came to see as 'very bad' and went to the extent of deleting it from her list of writings, although it is still in print. Laure Adler, Duras's biographer, points to its many infelicities, and it is certainly not always an easy ride: it contains much of the material Duras used to rail against. In parts I found it a little like attempting to wade through treacherous water, although perhaps that strays too far towards some of the metaphorical expressions Duras herself uses. In one by no means isolated sentence, for instance, the narrator speaks of a pine wood 'high as a church nave' and a river 'sinking like a knife into the bottom of the meadows'. Another wince–worthy sentence that came to my attention is 'The heat stagnated around the house, like a pond.' Umm.

Nevertheless, in spite of its many faults, Les Impudents carries the germ of Duras's later writings: thematically – listlessness, the torments of love, desire, suicide, lies, among many other things; and autobiographically, there's a mother particularly in love with her greedy and workshy wastrel son, plus a home in the south-west, near where Duras (who took her name from a village there) spent two of her childhood years.

Maud Grand is twenty, from a bourgeois family, and lives in Clamart (Hauts-de-Seine) with her mother Mme Tanerand, her forty-year-old brother Jacques (the wastrel), her half-brother Henri and her her step-father M Tanerand. Apart from her father who stays in their appartment in Paris, the family go to their property in Uderan, but it's now uninhabitable as they haven't stayed there for some years. Consequently they stay with the rich peasant family, the Pecresses, the mother of whom is keen to see her son Jean married off to Maud. This is not to be though, and after many events – the suicide of a girl both Jean and Jacques appear to have had a strong part in, the gossip and the shame Maud brings upon herself by shacking up for a few weeks with the essentially very respectable and caring Georges Durieux – the pregnant Maud marries Georges. Who said Duras doesn't do happy endings?

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