08/12/2019
This essay collection from the late French novelist, screenwriter, and film director Duras (1914–1996) is scattershot in its construction, but its individual pieces are solid. Written in the 1980s, the essays cover subjects ranging from the writer’s mother, toward whom she feels much ambivalence, to the 1986 bombing of Libya by the United States, which she opposes unequivocally. They also reveal an abiding preoccupation with the writing process itself, and its meaning in Duras’s life, as is apparent from the first piece, which reflects on “not being able to find the right path through which to enter your own work.” However, beyond this concern, the book lacks a sense of cohesion. Certain other themes—a looking back, a concern with France’s future, a search for the truth—can be teased out, but not enough to dispel the suspicion that Duras never intended these initially disparate pieces to be read together. If the reader can get beyond this lack of structure, there is much to be enjoyed. Duras’s fans will particularly treasure the clarity of thought that shines through this slight, thoughtful book, while neophytes will probably be better served starting elsewhere. (Oct.)
This little book of goodies starts off with a bang. . . . And the brief translators’ Afterword to this collection is a piece of writing on its own, a tender précis on the art, and dilemmas, of rendering Duras and her ‘écriture courant’ in English.” —Rachel Kushner, Artforum
“Of course many of us have read L’Amant, and many of us are already fans of the kind of autofiction that Duras helped popularize, but despite that I was unprepared for how deeply affecting a reading experience Me & Other Writing would be. Duras is not for an age, as they say, but for all time, and the pieces collected lovingly and thoughtfully into this volume will stay with me forever.” —Kyle Williams, Chicago Review of Books
“The work in Me & Other Writing varies from essays to journalism to the beginnings of the autofiction she would make famous with L’Amant, for which she won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, but they are completely alike in their didacticism, humor, pessimism, and intelligence. Her voice is so strong that she dissolves boundaries to create a single oeuvre, a composite but unified body of work.” —Natasha Boyd, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Baes and Ramadan capture the liberty and madness, the very breath of Duras’s thought: moving seamlessly between ideas, the measured precise inhales and exhales of an opera singer. They make distant events, foreign ideas, and even repulsive thoughts belong to the reader herself. . . . Reading Me & Other Writing is a powerful experience: I’ve been compelled to tell people about it and to share her ideas and nearly aphoristic paragraphs with my own writing students.” —Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, Words without Borders
“As Duras tells us about the Moscow Olympics, shipyard strikes in Gdańsk, her hopes for a proletarian revolution, and her despair at the 'misfortune of mankind,' she weaves in a tender narrative about a small boy and the adolescent girl who looks after him. This is entirely fictional—a characteristic ploy from a writer who believed that understanding suffering was an act of the imagination.” —The New Yorker
“Duras's writings span a host of styles and emotional tones, but Anglophone readers have, to date, not been exposed to nearly as much of her nonfiction. That's all about to change with this expansive collection of her nonfiction, offering readers a way to engage with a new, and equally impressive, side of Duras's bibliography.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“This is writing that demands, and provides, its own spotlight—not only through its incandescent intelligence (as in Duras's reading of the violence enacted not by, but upon, Simone Deschamps in 'Horror at Choisy-le-Roi'), but also through its refusal of linear exposition, the way it careens from one idea to another or dashes the reader's expectation of authorly pronouncements by offering instead a lyrical image (Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan reflect on the challenges of translating this opacity in an excellent note in the book's final pages).” —Heather Cleary, Literary Hub
“Essays, aphorisms and other eclectic nonfiction from one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists.” —The New York Times Book Review
“While reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever? Her nonfiction, written in the same blood and seawater as her fiction, produces the same sensation.” —Julia Berick, The Paris Review Daily
10/01/2019
Highlighting 16 essays written over various decades, this collection from French novelist (The Lover), filmmaker (Seven Days…Seven Nights), and playwright (with Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour) Duras (1914–96) discusses diverse topics such as reading, filmmaking, politics, and true crime incidents. Two notable pieces describe the author's complicated mother, "a great character," and the sorrow of giving birth to a stillborn son, documented 34 years after the event. In 1980, a newspaper commissioned Duras to report on the summer at a French beach town. Thus "Summer 80" mixes fiction and nonfiction and is the longest entry, comprising ten sections that examine current events of the period (Moscow Olympics, Gdansk Solidarity movement) combined with observations of beachgoers, from which develops a fictional story woven seamlessly into the narrative, depicting Europe before the collapse of communism and the opening of borders. Baes and Ramadan succeed at the challenging task of translating Duras's distinctive style while also managing to preserve the author's personality. VERDICT An admirable translation that will enthrall fans of French literature as well as 20th-century history buffs.—Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA
2019-07-15
Autobiographical pieces published from 1957 to 1988 from the late French filmmaker and experimental writer (The Lover, etc.).
This wide-ranging collection opens with a provocative, messy essay. It begins in classic Duras style with existential statements about the artist's life—"You compete with God," and "The unknown in my life is my written life. I will die without knowing this unknown." But without segue Duras is suddenly commenting on the enduring horror of the Holocaust, dropping statements like, "Those who say that the camps are a recognized, assimilated phenomenon are the new anti-Semites." The other pieces are generally more focused but with some distracting disregard for balanced form. Duras writes brilliantly about true crime, Yves Saint Laurent, the art of literary translation, her dislike of Sartre and Marxism-Leninism, and the magic of having her portrait painted. And she can stop hearts recalling scenes from her difficult childhood or her grief for her son who died an hour after birth. The genre-bending centerpiece, "Summer 80," echoes her memoir, Yann Andréa Steiner, as Duras muses on the sea while threading in two fables about a boy and a shark, and a boy and his female camp counselor on the beach. Adding in political commentary about Iran, the Moscow Olympic Games, the Polish workers' strike in Gdańsk, in Duras' hands the disparate mix of fact and fiction yields an overall feeling of intense, poetic vulnerability and fervent political ideals. The book's translators comment in an afterword on the difficulties of bringing these Duras texts into English "with all her strangeness and mystery intact." While there is often a thrilling sense of pushing into the hidden aspects of reality, the many hyperbolic and contradictory "absurdities," as Duras calls them, make for a bumpy ride.
A luminous, erudite exploration of self and art marred by too many outlandish turns.
