Marguerite Duras gets some love from The New York Review of Books, in an Edumund White essay that weaves in the two collections of Duras' wartime writings and her fiction: The North China Lover. Curiously, all three newly released books comes from different translators from the original French. Even more curiously: why isn't Duras talked about more? I was introduced to Duras' novella, The Lover, by a fiction-writing friend of mine last winter and, truly, it's wonderful. There's lot to love for readers in that eliding tale of drawn from Duras' childhood in Indochina; it was a bit-time internal seller, made into a movie and all that. And for writers, Duras is a mine of craft lessons of the best sort.
At least White is stepping up to remember Duras--who was, it seems, quite an unusual woman. There's no box to fit her into, this woman who worked with the Resistance and, as a young girl, with Nazi censors; whose myth-making extended beyond the borders of her fiction; this elegant alocholic who was quite talented with the pen.
Preposterous, self-obsessed, eloquent, unstoppable, Duras left her mark on French letters, theater, and cinema. She produced a bibliography of fifty-three titles, though some are very short (La Pute de la côte normande is just twenty pages long). Elisabeth Schwarzkopf once said that to be a successful opera singer you have to have a distinctive voice and be very loud. By those standards Marguerite Duras was a great diva indeed.
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