Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle (1987)

La Vie matérielle is a collection of 47 texts of very differing lengths, almost all of which are taken from what Marguerite Duras said to Jérôme Beaujour about her feelings of her past and present life. They have been re-worked, although what Duras says about them is that they have no beginning and no end, that this is neither journal nor novel, just pieces taken from her everyday life.

They are, though, very revealing: the reader, for instance, may well have known about Duras’s hospitalisations for her chronic alcoholism, but not about her thoughts on alcohol, or the hallucinatory hell she went through coming off drink. She says here that alcohol is made to render the emptiness of the universe more tolerable, that it replaces the lack of God, that even tramps are made intellectuals through alcohol!

Duras also reveals more things about her very violent but very loving sexual relationship with the writer Gérard Jarlot, although (as in the earlier Les Parleuses interviews with Xaviêre Gauthier) she doesn’t mention his name. But she did, in 1958, dedicate her novel Moderato cantabile to ‘G. J.’: she says both in Les Parleuses and La Vie matéielle that the man is responsible for changing her writing style from that novel on.

All in all, it would have been some loss not to have published (as Duras had considered) this often surprising collection of observations by one of the world’s most important writers.

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