War: A Memoir Book

Published some forty years after it was written during the liberation of Paris, Marguerite Duras, with a state of mind that is clearly under the influence of paranoia, anguish, and deep worry, writes of her day to day experiences in 1944, during uncertain times in the French capital. Duras apparently found this written account as a diary in a couple of exercise books inside a cupboard, and says,

"I have no recollection of having written it. I know I did. I recognize my own handwriting, details of the story, I can see the place, and various comings and goings. But I can't see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so?, in what year?, at what times of the day?, in what house?
I can't remember."

Asked by a magazine many years later for a text she had penned during her younger days, she confronts herself with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling to describe 'The War' as a one of the most important things in her life. Duras writes here (like some of her fictional work) using a spare, and almost arid prose, she keeps sentences brief, sometimes only two or three words long. She is continually self-involved, examining emotions and intellectual reactions to emotional states until it feels almost suffocating. It's painful, at least in the first third, which shes her husband (Robert. L) returning from Belsen a mere skeleton, more dead than alive. In fact death and dying is something Duras can't escape from, tormented, believing he will never come back, she thinks of her own death, constantly, in a state of acceptance. The original French title 'La douleur' (Suffering) would have been a far more appropriate title at this point. Nursing her love back from the brink is horrendous in detail, he can't eat properly as the shock to his body could kill him, but needs food and water as to survive, he passes a nauseating liquid waste, that has the foul, God awful stench of decomposition. But Slowly, very slowly, his condition would improve, as the lingering smell of death seems to leave his body. For Marguerite though, the love she once had for her husband, has been ravaged by the war.

The rest of the memoir looks at Duras's involvement with the French Resistance network, the brutal Interrogation of a suspected collaborator, and her run in a with the Jew hunter 'Rabier', a sly Gestapo officer who takes a liking to her, but only for his plans of gaining information on colleagues. She plays into his hands, probably for survival, and a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse endures on the streets of Paris. The book is completed with two very short fictional works whilst Duras served in the French Communist Party. 'The Crushed Nettle' is followed by 'Aurelia Paris' (which she was tempted to transpose to the stage) about a young girl hiding out in a tower with an old woman, gun in hand, simply waiting for the German police to knock on the door.

Honest, harrowing, and intense, this may not be her best work, but it is no doubt the most truthful and hard-hitting. As a fan of World War Two non-fiction I have read better, but as a Duras purest this was simply a must. For anyone that appreciates her writing it's worth a look, or for that matter an interest in life during WW2. An excellent account of a woman living through hell, but it still lacked some depth with being only 180 pages long.