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A member of the French Resistance during World War II, Duras experienced even further pain and hardship when her brother Paulo died in 1942, and then when her new husband Robert Antelme was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp for his involvement with the Resistance, and scarcely survived the experience.īy the 1950s, Duras had established herself as a writer and has continued to be published ever since. She was an active supporter of the French Communist Party (the PCF), and in her mid to late twenties she worked representing the colony of Indochina for the French government.
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When Duras was 17 she left Saigon for Paris, where she began studying for a degree in mathematics (before changing her mind and trying political science and law, as well). Two of the works she is most famous for, in fact, are her novels The Lover and The North China Lover, throughout both of which she uses her minimal style to describe her teen years and her sexual awakening with Huynh Thuy Le. Her younger brother Paulo seemed a touch mentally challenged and was, supposedly, the only thing she cared for as a child and teenager.Īs a teenager, Duras began an affair with an older Chinese merchant, Huynh Thuy Le, a time in her life that would often be revisited in her later work. According to Duras, her older brother Pierre had a mean streak and bullied his two younger siblings mercilessly. It is very likely that this lack of a compass for creative writing helped shape her singular style later.ĭuras’ childhood was anything but average, as growing up French but poor in Indochina was far from ideal. Duras made frequent allusions to having always wanted to be a writer, though had fewer literary influences on her writing in early life than other children her age.
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Duras’ father died when she was only four, and Duras and her two brothers were raised in relative poverty by her mother. Marguerite Donnadieu (pen name Duras, taken after the French town where her father passed away) was born in Saigon (at that time in an area called Gia-Dinh), French Indochina in April of 1914. Marguerite as a young girl in Indochina, pictured here with her brothers Pierre and Paulo and a friend. Despite the often explicit and controversial themes and plots in her novels, many of which were drawn from her real-life experiences, Duras has been a beloved figure in the field of “serious literature” (a genre I just made up, you’ll be pleased to know) for decades. Marguerite Duras, the French novelist, essayist, playwright and film director, could certainly be considered controversial in both work (like the Marquis) and life (like Wilde). We can only imagine the hell-fire that would begin to burn should any school library choose to keep a holding of The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein on hand! In modern days we have parents and schools banning books by authors like Judy Blume and Laurie Halse Anderson because they deal with sex and coming-of-age experiences in young-adult fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was banned in many different countries, including France (you know it’s controversial when even the French consider it obscene…). Harriet Beecher Stowe caused a flurry of activity around the anti-slavery act in the United States.
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Oscar Wilde self-exiled himself to Paris for the unimaginable treatment he received for the “crime” of homosexuality. The Marquis de Sade was incarcerated in an insane asylum for his erotic tales. Again and again, the novel returns to the seduction, and to sex, and has a moody power that Duras fans will welcome and applaud.Throughout history, writers have been known to cause a stir. And yet the characters-who have no dramatic roles to play here-emerge as dark symbols that have a psychological immediacy for the narrator that can here and there be shared. (The Chinese lover is the first of hundreds-or it is implied that he is-who will never fully succeed in distracting her from her feelings of shame.) The connections that Duras is trying for remain hazy.
THE LOVER DURAS SEX FREE
She uses these clothes to seduce a wealthy Chinese merchant (scorned by the French colonists) and to free herself, for a time, from the emotional demands of a sordid family life. From the perspective of old age, the ""I"" narrator of this eerie and compact autobiographical novel-which won the 1985 Prix Goncourt in France and has sold 700,000 copies there-relives her troubled adolescence by means of weighted images: frozen memories of her impoverished, harried mother, a schoolmistress in pre-World War II French Indochina, where the narrator grew up of the narrator's two brothers, the older one corrupt and menacing, the younger mute and gentle but meant to die at a young age and of herself at 15, especially aboard a ferry crossing the Mekong River into Saigon, dressed in thin silk, an old felt hat and golden sandals.