Reviews for Wartime Writings: 1943-1949

The average rating for Wartime Writings: 1943-1949 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-20 00:00:00 William Brannaman Wartime Writings: 1943-1949 works simultaneously as a "gateway" to the immense literary work of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). The volume ranges from excerpts from early books by the French writer, from the 1950s, such as "A Dam Against the Pacific", to early versions of novels that she will publish much later, in the 1980s, as "The War". The texts, written between 1943 and 1949, a crucial period in the author's life, thus fulfil the role of showing the reader a kind of panel of her production, at the same time that they give those who already know her the possibility of reliving from a different contact with recurring situations and characters. Like almost everything she did, these notebooks are strongly autobiographical, and the attention they received from Duras' biographers was not small, as the organizers of the volume point out. There, the childhood lived in Indochina reappears, the relationship with the mother, the loving initiation, the return to France, the years of the Nazi occupation and the resistance.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-03 00:00:00 R T I've started to get into Duras's work again after an absence of a couple of years. I'm not surprised by just how much I missed her. The clear, minimalist prose, stating and restating experience and feeling - desire, suffering, fear, passion, fury is the one of reasons she works so well for me. This was the third Duras book recently, and the one I wanted to read the most. As a big Duras fan I immediately recognized her unique voice as Wartime Writings developed: feverish, sometimes feral, spare, yet pitilessly unsentimental. As much as I enjoyed the book what interested me more is how it came about. Four small Duras notebooks from the war years were hidden and forgotten in her chateau which contained much insight into her fiction and her life. Although there are pieces in the Notebooks you can read nowhere else, all the ideas, themes and stories that were to make her famous begin here, as does that tightrope of anguish and eroticism that marks the Durasian universe - at once shocking, mischievous and heart-breaking. Duras chronicles the poignant circumstances of her childhood in colonial Vietnam and the true story behind 'The Lover', her experiences with the French Resistance during the war, and the conflicted and exhilarating time of the Liberation and the early postwar years. Throughout, Duras paints an unflinching portrait of this troubled and formative period in France's history. This is not so much the beginnings of all her best fiction as the notebooks can be distinguished as works in their own right. I would only recommend this to those who truly love her work.