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Nov 14, 2017 | ISBN 9781101907931 Buy
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Nov 14, 2017 | ISBN 9781101907931
A hardcover omnibus edition of the French writer’s most famous novel—the basis for the film Memoir of War—alongside her fascinating wartime writings and a collection of intimate autobiographical essays. Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of postwar France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras’s formative experiences—including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband’s return from Nazi internment—revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in prewar Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France’s colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken, and surprisingly fresh and relevant today.
One of France’s most important literary figures, MARGUERITE DURAS is best known in the United States for her novel The Lover, and for her brilliant film script Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She is also the author of many other acclaimed novels (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) and screenplays (Détruire,… More about Marguerite Duras
PRACTICALITIES: “A mind alive to the possibilities of human experience and of the word, and a writer with the courage to publish truly her experience as a woman.” —Newsday
WARTIME NOTEBOOKS: “By turns ardent, raging, sensual and embittered. . . . A dreamlike, savage world, in which the great themes of love, war, and death found their most recklessly impassioned chronicler.” —The Observer
THE LOVER: “An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl.” —Boston Herald
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