The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities: Introduction by Rachel Kushner

by Marguerite Duras, Rachel Kushner (Introduction)

A hardcover omnibus edition of the French writer's most famous novel alongside her fascinating wartime writings and a collection of searingly honest and intimate autobiographical essays. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS.

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of post-war 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.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Essays, France, Literature, Female Authors, French Literature

504 pages, Hardcover

Published November 14, 2017

About the author

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certain flow of language might have been lost in translation, but Marguerite's genius in language burns bright through the pages. Though overly self-assured in tone, she demonstrates that passionate love must also be desperate, and that its effect is simultaneously ebullient and devastating.

[Faraaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impeccable writing.

[blah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to give this book its well deserved 4 stars for the beautiful writing and world building but I can’t do that because it would be slightly inauthentic, seeing as there were a lot of parts that I couldn’t quite understand.

I read this mostly because my library didn’t have a sole copy of ‘The Lover’ and I’m glad that I got to read this because I came across pieces of writing that believe surpass The Lover in both prose and depth. But it would be very remiss of me to not acknowledge my lack of understanding when it came to some parts of the book. There was talks about historical leaders and events that weren’t thoroughly explained—even though they were explained at the end of the story through footnotes—it didn’t make much sense to someone who wasn’t very familiar with the historical connotations in the writing. Duras also referred to many of her previous works throughout ‘The Wartime Notebooks’ and ‘Practicalities.’ These references graced me with a sort grandeur that is only brought forward by genuine confusion. I haven’t read any of her previous works and throughout most of this book Marguerite Duras was talking to me as though I should be well versed in all her writings by now. I couldn’t grasp any of what was being referred to, but was weirdly intrigued because the contents was described with such passion.

My favourite passages from this book were

1. The War (rough draft)
2. Did Not Die Deported
3. Men
4. The Horror Of Such Love (rough draft)
5. House and Home

Some of the stories were quite boring, and it took me a while to generate enough strength to understand what she was saying because my interest would be dwindling halfway through every sentence. I often had to read and re-read some of her passages entirely because she would be “writing like (she) had been reading Hemingway.” But even in the words that i had to struggle to read and understand was an indescribable beauty, sometimes it felt as if she was the only person who had felt the same feelings I encounter everyday.

[SB · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is my first foray into duras' works, but this anthology, i think, doesn't give proper justice to her oeuvre. however, i actually have a basic idea now how she writes and that's impressed me very much. but, this anthology underwhelmed me when i was thinking of loving this anthology completely. here are my detailed thoughts on the books selected for this anthology:

1) the lover: this book might be the most popular duras book, and this is where i got readily impressed by her writing style. in this book, duras' writing comes out of fear and lack which had its deep roots to her adolescent life. her prose is like made of various small freeze-shots. it's like some photographic memories are waiting to be a complete moving image. it's like you're a visitor to the museum of her photographic memories. it's written in an extremely careful and detailed manner. she writes about her insecurities and vulnerabilities as a young woman with much efficiency. she makes that as her shield of her storytelling, but sometimes, it felt like she's mocking her and the women for being foolish. her mother, being matriarch and controller of her life, restricted her to be free. so, throughout this novel, she wanted us to tell that she wanted to be free from this control. this book is like purgatorio of her life's troubled times and experiences. this novel is actually her embittered autobiographical account. another major theme of this novel is time. time flows and stops in its own rule in this novel, like time is built on a whim. writing this book was actually an act of rebellion on which she succeeded. moreover, one word that often recurs in this novel time to time is 'desire'. she writes about the desire to love, the desire to be free, and therefore, the desire to live. this novel screams for desire, this novel smells of desire, this novel breathes desire. therefore, through this novel, her writing searches for the freedom through the photographic memories of her adolescent times. and, i loved it so much.

2) wartime notebooks: this part takes from of her notebooks and its materials that she wrote in it. they are largely autobiographical, but it covers different topic from french colonialism to her ominous trip to italy. this is also where autobiography becomes fiction and vice-versa. these writings of duras mainly tell us that everything in here is a part of her memory -- both personal and political -- which bled her life throughout. and, these words take a certain coagulated form which is both unforgotten and unforgiven by her. but, reading this made me bored to death. these notebooks are published without edit and revision because it was released posthumously, and i think duras didn't wish to publish this after her death (but, who knows!). however, these notebooks mainly contain drafts to her unfinished novels which are not later touched by her. publishing this give meaning to an incomplete task. so, it doesn't serve its purpose to me, at least, to include in this another. yes, the three books in this anthology connect the autobiographical contents from her works, but it gets boring to know about one thing repeatedly. i was mostly bored out of my mind, and she cursed her readers in one of her drafts because of a particular situation she faced in her life. i think she would've edited that out if she had to revise it. but, it was senseless for the original (greedy) publishers to publish this which particularly has no literary value and mainly disassociate with her frequently poetic vision.

3) practicalities: this book contains interviews of duras which feels like you're reading a moving documentary about an artist's life in her own poetic language and narration. this is where she is most furiously honest about her life and works. moreover, her writing is very much sensuous with sexual details (i can see where maso got her influence). she frequently took sides with the women to fight the injustices that have been brought by patriarchy, but she didn't urge them to make their sons to fight along with them. she perhaps missed the two-sided violence of patriarchy which also makes men its victims. this is how she openly advocates of partial feminism which is not helpful towards the issue of feminism regarding the battle against patriarchy. her viewpoints are a little myopic, murky, heavily biased and frighteningly cynical. i've found some of her opinions very problematic and a little loose. though she talks about the events of her life beautifully, but i suddenly felt that i've lost interest to know more about her life. i have known about her life in this anthology and this book is no exception. so, it has also made me bored reading about the same thing again and again.

[Eolann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The three titles by Duras collected here were all originally published separately, and written over a period of several decades. But read together they play of each other in interesting ways outside of what I think Duras intended.

The first title in the collection, "The Lover" is a short novel published when Duras was in her 70s, and is presented as being an autobiographical depiction of a love affair she had aged 15, while living in French occupied indochina, with a nameless Chinese business man in his late twenties. I liked this despite itself; the book is written in brief paragraph fragments, with a lot of stylistic skill and originality; Duras alternates between "I" and "She" as she looks back over half a century on her younger self, a viewpoint that felt original and distinct. At the same time, "The Lover'' embodies a particular type of stereotypical frenchness to an almost cartoonish degree; the characters engaging in transgressive love affairs with an air of doomed resignation, family members wearily alienated from each other, the narrator musing from a distance,deadly serious and remote from her sadness, everyone prematurely cynical and unimpressed. It's the narrative equivalent of performatively staring into the middle distance while deep in thought, smoking a cigarette. This tone feels particularly jarring against the vulnerable figure of the 15 year old Duras; the book is meant to be autobiographical, but her teenage self acts with an unlikely level of insouciance and cool acceptance. Duras at various points suggests that she was the instigator and dominant force in the relationship, despite having had no previous relationships with men; the impression I got was that this was how Duras may have wanted to see herself looking back, rather than what the experience was actually like.

This is where the unexpected play between the three titles in the collection starts; "Wartime Notebooks" was published after "The Lover", and after Duras death, but was actually written decades earlier during the second World War. They don't seem to have been intended for publication and are a scattered collection of various stories, essays and autobiographical fragments. The largest of these covers the same time in Duras life as "The Lover", and was written much closer to the time of these events. In contrast to the later novel, here Duras describes her teenage self as naive and unsure, often repulsed by the older man who initiates the relationship, and is more direct that her families poverty and need for money are what pressure her into being essentially exploited by the rich business man, rather than any sense of romance or love. This version feels much more truthful, and is written in a direct unadorned style lacking the flourishes of the novel; it is much more powerful and leaves "The Lover" feeling very hollow by comparison. Similarly, many of the other fragments in these notebooks, covering Duras experiencing in Indochina as a child, her adulthood during the second World War in France and her husbands imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, are much more impactful than anything in "The Lover": even though these fragments were written whole she was a young inexperienced writer, they are more engaging than the later novel from the distinguished public intellectual intellectual that Duras eventually grew to be.

The last title in the collection, an essayistic assembly called "practicalities", is similarly written in shorter fragments, and was written near the end of Duras life, giving her opinion on a range of topics alongside more autobiographical sketches, when she is once again the great lady of letters. The air of self seriousness and affectation returns, and while some of the fragments are interesting (in particular around her alcoholism), there's nothing here that is as strong as the "Wartime Notebooks". 

The impression I got from these three titles  was that Duras was a naturally talented writer and skilled memoirist, but that as she matured she moved towards a more stylised prose that was less emotionally direct and more self-flattering. The introduction to this volume mentions that in her mature career, Duras was notorious for referring to herself in the third person, as a grand entity; her later writing style makes this very easy to believe. 

[Rahaf. · Rating 3 out of 5]

الطبعة التي لديّ تحوي الكثير من النصوص ل مارغريت دوراس، لكن ما أريد الكلام عنه هو النص المعنون:
‏ "Childhood and Adolescent in Idochina"

هذا النص الذي شكل المادة الأساسية لرواية دوراس الشهيرة "العاشق". في الحقيقة، لقد قرأت "العاشق" ولكني لم استمتع بها مثلما استمتعت بالنص التي اُقتبست منه الرواية.

النص هو عبارة عن مذكرات دوراس عن طفولتها في الهند الصينية تحت الاحتلال الفرنسي، والتي تعرف الآن ب فيتنام. دوراس صاحبة قلم صريح وجذاب. عندما كنت اقرأ مذكراتها، ذكرني اسلوبها ب آني أرنو، لكن كتابة دوراس يوجد بها مشاعر، أما أرنو، في بعض الأحيان، أحس أنها باردة، وصريحة بفجاجة.

طفولة دوراس صعبة. والدها توفى ووالدتها مديرة لمدرسة ما، وتقع عائلتها في أسفل السلم الاجتماعي. أثرت حالة والدتها النفسية المتقلبة على دوراس، فتارة تحبسها في الغرفة وتضربها، وتارة أخرى تقول لها أنها تحبها وهذا فعل ناتج عن الحب.
تقول دوراس:
“In her good moments, my mother would tell me, ‘You, you’re my little waif.’ Such marks of of affection, which revealed that my mother loved me for the very reasons that so often turned her against me, were beyond price, especially since they were so rare.”

وأخوها الكبير أيضاً يضربها بشدة ويسبها. حتى عندما انتقلت لباريس وسكن هو معها، لم يتوقف عن ضربها. تقول:
“He got into the habit of turning out my pockets every evening. Then he’d beat me, claiming that I was being ‘kept’ and that he’d ‘teach me how to live,’ that he was ‘doing this for my own good.’ “

كانت عائلة دوراس مفككة، لم يكن هناك شعور بالألفة. لم تكن هناك إلا سخرية لاذعة تخفي تحت قناعها وجع وقهر. كتبت عن عائلتها:
“To understand such naïvetè, which might seem far-fetched, one must realize that we were sunk in a boundless childhood from which, all in all, we were trying in vain to escape. We were even spending our whole lives trying to get out of it any way we could.”

التقت دوراس ب ليو، شاب غني من السكان الأصليين، الذين هم أدنى طبقات المجتمع في ذلك الوقت. يقع ليو في حبها، وتتظاهر مارغريت بأنها تحبه، لأنه يجعلها مهمة في عائلتها. فلقد استفادت عائلة مارغريت من ليو الثري، من الخدمات التي قدمها لهم، والجولات التي قام بها من أجلهم، لا، إنما من أجل مارغريت، لكنها هي من أصرت عليه أن يصطحب معها عائلتها. كانت تجده قبيح، لكنها تحبه لأنه غني، لأنه يملك ما لا تملك. تقول:
“Sitting in his magnificent limousine, he made a considerable impression on me, and I never got used to it. I was in love with Lèo when he paid for the cold suppers and champagne in the nightclubs.”

حتى في هذه العلاقة، لم تكن دوراس سعيدة. تقول قاصدةً ليو:
“ I gave him a detailed schedule of my activities, I yielded to all his arbitrary demands. I obey them rigorously…. But Lèo never entirely believed me.”

والدتها لم تفعل شيء سوى ضربها والخوف من أن تفقد عذريتها. كل ما يهمها هو المال. ما إن تحضر مارغريت المال من ليو، حتى تقول لها والدتها أعطيني إياه.
هناك الكثير مما أود قوله، لكني سوف أختم بهذا الاقتباس من رواية العاشق:
“I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.”

[Qtprep1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve only finished the Lover part of the book. Lots of themes on racism & reversed racism and wealth vs poor which served as the boundaries between the 2 ‘lovers’. The girl’s family seemed to be emotionally stunted with their inability to express healthy emotions and resolve conflicts. The mother seemed to an enabler of maladaptive behaviors of the oldest son as well as enabling the daughter deep down the relationships with the ‘forbidden’ love with the Chinese lover.

Stories are told in non-linear timely manner. Somewhat difficult to follow. Flashbacks of memories. Lots of fragmented sentences. Mostly told in emotions and deep in the head thinking. Not much descriptions of the objects around: much like how the girl described her mother totally disresgarded the surroundings and the belongings in the colonized Saigon- her only prized possessions are her children. Likewise, the girl’s only prized possessions seemed to be emotions and perceptions of people around her.

Some subtle lesbian references in the stories such as the girl’s desires and relations with Helene or maybe even her mother with Dô such as her intense happiness transformation when sitting down with Dô alone only to be dissipated when her mother saw the girl.

Some descriptions of the social scenes in Paris during the Nazi-occupied time were pretty interesting lenses to the time being.

I found this book very unique giving a glimpse window in time to a forbidden love story during colonized indochina time much as like The Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, … I don’t like how it felt a bit like Lolita at times though.

I appreciated how through the story I learned about racial segregation in Saigon 1930s as well as how transportation worked in that era: ferry, trans-ocean voyage, old automobiles, etc.

The Chinese man seemed effeminate and it seemed the girl was a bit manly with her donning of man’s fedora hat trait. Yet, when they are together, the man, despite his effeminate exterior, was quite in charge and she the other way around. Despite his familiarity of many women, he was always seeming to have stuttering or trembling around her, does it mean that he actually had feelings for her? Lots are left to the readers’ interpretations.

Also, some seemingly redundant descriptions of some characters such as some socialites in Paris, not sure what was the author’s intentions?

[LUCHI · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing and plot is bold for the time it was written in. The language and narration is bang on. There aren't many characters in this but those who are, they portrayed all emotional a person might go through in their lives. The plot is hauntingly beautiful. Their love is doomed from the beginning, it's obvious. But it hit hard nonetheless. I didn't cry at the end but when I watched the movie a day later, I cried. It's beautiful and the author is really bold!

[Paul Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lover is 5* undoubtedly. Short snappy sentences and not a word out of place. The wartime notebooks are really only worth 2* being disjointed and not in the nature of a diary but jottings and aborted writings. Practicalitites loses some of it effect if one doesn't know the history and the people to which they refer. However, there are some scintillating passages particularly about her alcohol problems.

[Helen McClory · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't read the middle section, as it was basically just notes on her other novels, but The Lover and Practicalities are unmissable. She stared at everything so hard it peeled away; not necessarily revealing an essential truth, but her own, human one.

[Troy Farlow · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t fancy this book like I do most classics. Didn’t really like it at all honestly.

[Lisa Daleiden-Brugman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only managed to get through The Lover. Odd and confusing.

[Celia Chuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading The Lover for the third time and I just have to admit that I could always discover something hidden charms everytime I read it

[Salvatore]

A great collection of work.