Marguerite Duras

Saigon, 1930s: a poor French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society. A sensational international bestseller and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, The Lover is disturbing, erotic and masterly. This is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between the lovers and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

The Lover

A man hires an unnamed woman to stay with him for several weeks in the hope that he will, for the first time in his life, be able to experience love with a woman

The Malady of Death

Roman

Moderato cantabile

Written in the spareness of her late style, "Writing" represents Marguerite Duras's theory of literature and provides readers with the literary testament of one of France's most important 20th-century literary figures.

Writing

The Ravishing of Lol Stein is a haunting early novel by the author of The Lover. Lol Stein is a beautiful young woman, securely married, settled in a comfortable life—and a voyeur. Returning with her husband and children to the town where, years before, her fiancé had abandoned her for another woman, she is drawn inexorably to recreate that long-past tragedy. She arranges a rendezvous for her friend Tatiana and Tatiana’s lover. She arranges to spy on them. And then, she goes one step further . . .

The Ravishing of Lol Stein

In this classic novel by the best-selling author of The Lover, erotic intrigue masks a chillingly deceptive form of madness. Elisabeth Alione is convalescing in a hotel in rural France when she meets two men and another woman. The sophisticated dalliance among the four serves to obscure an underlying violence, which, when the curtain of civilization is drawn aside, reveals in her fellow guests a very contemporary, perhaps even new, form of insanity. Like many of Duras's novels, Destroy, She Said owes much to cinema, displaying a skillful interplay of dialogue and description. There are recurring moods and motifs from the Duras repertoire: eroticism, lassitude, stifled desire, a beautiful woman, a mysterious forest, a desolate provincial hotel. Included in this volume is an in-depth interview with Duras by Jacques Rivette and Jean Narboni.

Destroy, She Said

O Amante

Novel retelling the dramatic experiences of the author's adolescence - as previously described in the 1984 Prix Goncourt winning T̀he Lover'.

The North China Lover

Dans l'ambiance languissante de l'Indochine coloniale des années 1930, entre forêt et fleuve, une jeune blanche qui n'a pas seize ans découvre le plaisir avec un riche chinois et s'arrache progressivement à une insupportable famille. Le plus autobiographique des récits de l'auteure. Le récit d'une passion charnelle, scandaleuse et sans avenir (mais quelle passion s'inquiète de l'avenir?). Très accessible. Grand succès de librairie en France. Prix Goncourt 1984. Prix Goncourt 1984.

L'amant

For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside. The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence. An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

The Easy Life

Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (Folio)

El Amante/The Lover

Suspended and awaiting his next assignment, the French Vice-Consul at Lahore falls hopelessly in love with the French ambassador's wife

The Vice-consul

The extraordinary pages of The War, written in 1944 but finished in 1985, form a totally new image of the heroine of The Lover and, through her, of Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. Married and living in Paris, part of a resistance network headed by Francois Mitterand, Duras is swept up in the turmoil of the period. She tells of nursing her starving husband back to life on his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who is attracted to her. The result is a book as moving as it is harrowing--perhaps Duras's finest.

A Memoir

The War

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Essay. Film. Literary Criticism. Translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan. Introduction by Dan Gunn. In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the "scattering of desire" to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. ME & OTHER WRITING is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page "Me" to the sprawling 70-page "Summer 80," there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

Me & Other Writing

In prewar Indochina during the last days of colonialism, a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl initiates herself into a world of passion and lust, of abandon and undying love, through her love affair with a Chinese man

A young man, who has fallen in love with another man he has only glimpsed, isolates himself with a woman who resembles that man, and a strange ritual of attraction and repellance ensues

Blue Eyes, Black Hair

"A major publishing event: the previously untranslated story of a family's moral reckoning and a daughter's fall from grace, from the renowned author of The Lover and The War"--

The Impudent Ones

L'amante

"It's the women who upset the applecart. Between themselves they talk only about the practicalities of life", declares Duras in this collection of her transcribed conversations with friend Jerome Beaujour. Some of her free-ranging meditations are short and deceptively simple, while many are autobiographical and reveal her most intimate thoughts about motherhood, her struggle with alcohol, her love for a young man, and more.

Marguerite Duras

Books

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