These circumstances contribute to the peculiarity of her worldview, which expresses a fatalism that exists in tandem with wild extremes of emotion, and a deep distrust of right and wrong. Her life was full of lopsided love affairs: she spent her childhood defending her developmentally impaired younger brother against the abuses of their elder brother, she fell in love as a teenager with an older man, she lost a child at birth, she spent the last decade of her life partnered with a much younger gay man, and she suffered a lifelong battle with alcoholism. During World War II, Duras joined the Resistance and the French Communist Party-her first husband was sent to Buchenwald and Dachau, from where he returned weighing only eighty pounds. Her family fell into financial ruin after her mother invested in a piece of property that flooded during the rainy season, resulting in an impossible battle against the ocean (the subject of her 1950 novel The Sea Wall). “I think I have always suffered in my life, suffered,” Duras writes in the first essay, “and so I had fertile, abundant ground to write on.” The writer grew up in French-occupied Vietnam, raised by her mother, a schoolteacher.
If Balzac’s densely described universe leaves the reader immobilized in place, Duras requires a different form of submission: one that is active, necessitating constant voluntary consent. These pointedly uneven essays, ranging from 350 words to more than seventy pages, are full of silences and contradictions, leaping between politics, memory, literature, fashion, and art.
This, in its negative form, could serve as an approximation of Duras’s literary ethos, which is on display in Me & Other Writings, a newly translated collection of nonfiction released this month by Dorothy Project. “Balzac describes everything, everything. In a 1991 profile, the writer Leslie Garis asks Marguerite Duras, then seventy-seven, about her resistance to Balzac and other classical novelists.
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