Her husband was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. She moved to France at 17, studied law, joined the Communist Party, wrote screenplays (most famously for “Hiroshima Mon Amour”). Her mother pimped her out to a wealthy Vietnamese man when she was 14, the basis of her autobiographical novel “The Lover.” One older brother enjoyed beating her, the other creeping into her bed at night. No one endured what she had to - who among us could?ĭuras grew up desperately poor in French-occupied Indochina, sometimes hunting birds and game to survive. All these preoccupations that feel so fresh, and of this moment - anything you’d find in a book by Renee Gladman, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson - has a prototype somewhere in Duras’s work.īut still no one writes like Duras or sounds like her, because no one has lived as she did or knows what she knew. The melding of memoir and artifice called autofiction the fondness for fragments the evasive, obliquely wounded female narrator the excavations into trauma, addiction, maternity. Name a current literary trend, and the French writer Marguerite Duras almost certainly got to it first - and took it further than anyone working today.
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