This 1944 diary of a young Resistance member, written during the
last days of the French occupation and the first days of the
liberation, is only now being published - Duras says she forgot
about it during the intervening years, and only recently
rediscovered it in a cupboard. The loneliness and ambivalence of
love and war have appeared in Duras' work before, from The Lover to
Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which a Frenchwoman reveals to her Japanese
lover, after the bomb, that she was tortured and imprisoned in
postwar France for her affair with a German soldier. In the first
section of The War, Duras the heroine waits for her husband to
return from the Belsen concentration camp. When De Gaulle ("by
definition leader of the Right - ") says, "The days of weeping are
over. The days of glory have returned," Duras says, "We shall never
forgive him." It's because he's denying the people's loss. When her
husband returns, she has to hide the cake she baked for him,
because the weight of food in his system can kill. (We are spared
no detail of his physical degradation, even to being told the color
of his stools.) When he is stronger, she tells him she is divorcing
him to marry another Resistance member. In the second section, set
earlier, at the time of her husband's arrest, a Gestapo official
plays a cat-and-mouse game with Duras, to whom he's attracted,
preying on her desperation to help her husband. In the third
section, post-liberation, she switches roles, becomes an
interrogator as Resistance members torture a Nazi informer. She
also half-falls in love (with characteristic Duras dualism) with a
young prisoner who childishly joined the collaborationist forces
out of nothing more than a passion for fast cars and guns. In her
preface, Duras says it "appalls" her to reread this memoir, because
it is so much more important than her literary work. Certainly,
like everything she has written in her spare, impassive voice, the
book is at once elegant and brutal in its honesty: in her world, we
are all outcasts, and the word "liberation" is never free of irony.
A powerful, moving work. (Kirkus Reviews)
From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras's
haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was
torn asunder Written in 1944 and first published in 1985, Duras's
riveting account of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and
the first months of liberation depicts the harrowing realities of
World War II-era France "with a rich conviction enhanced by [a]
spare, almost arid, technique" (Julian Barnes, The Washington Post
Book World ). Duras, by then married and part of a French
resistance network headed by Francois Mitterand, tells of nursing
her starving husband back to health after his return from
Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing
a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who was attracted to
her. The result is "more than one woman's diary . . . [it is] a
haunting portrait of a time and a place and also a state of mind"
(The New York Times).
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