Writing

by Marguerite Duras, Mark Polizzotti (Translator)

Overview

Writing, one of Marguerite Duras’s last works, is a meditation on the process of writing and on her need for solitude in order to do it. In the five short pieces collected in this volume, she explores experiences that had an emotional impact on her and that inspired her to write. These vary from the death of a pilot in World War II, to the death of a fly, to an art exhibition. Two of the pieces were made into documentary films, and one was originally a short film. Both autobiographical and fictional, like much of her work, Writing displays Duras’s unique worldview and sensitive insight in her simple and poetic prose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452943749
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	02/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in 1914 in French Indochina, Marguerite Duras is one of France’s most important literary figures. She wrote several dozen books but is best known in the United States for her novel The Lover, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt, and for her screenplay, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She died in 1996.

Mark Polizzotti is the author of six books and the translator of more than thirty, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, and Maurice Roche.

Editorial Reviews

Mark Polizotti's translation from the French captures the poetic simplicity of Duras's style -- a language delicate, yet rich in imagery. -- New York Times Book Review

Emily-Greta Tabourin

Duras's final work, sensitively translated from the French by Polizzotti, is both a brief theory of literature and a personal memoir. Duras (1914-96), winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt for her novel The Lover (LJ 6/1/85) and best known to Americans for her screenplay Hiroshima mon Amour, declares that solitude is essential to her process because writing means "keeping silent . . . screaming without sounds." Throughout, Duras vividly re-creates emotional experiences--including her reactions to the death of a 21-year-old English pilot, killed by the Germans in 1944--and displays her unique, detailed perception to reveal great reverence for human life and respect for memory. An enthralling book, particularly for writers and Duras's fans. Recommended for all libraries.--Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis

Library Journal

In this very slender volume, Duras shares with us the writer's preoccupations with the distance between life and writing, and the contradiction between writing and silence. Winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt for her novel "The Lover", Duras died in 1996. She is without a doubt one of this century's great literary figures. But that haunting quality, the characteristically slow and deliberate language of her novels, translates less well when her subject is a kind of confessional of her life and work. The five short chapters that make up "Writing" circle around Duras's way into and out of the world. Her bare prose casts that same silence she considers fundamental to any writer: It is "the price one pays for having dared go out and scream." At this point, one chooses to either get lost in her fantasy or bow out, because much of Duras's prose begs the point with characteristic vagueness. Whether sitting alone considering the death of a fly, or trying to capture the entire life of a young pilot in the moment of his death, Duras is convinced that the "death of that fly has become this displacement of literature" and that writing it "renders it inaccessible." What remains is the nakedness of writing itself, and Duras hones this point into the ground. Strangely, the most poignant image of the creative act according to Duras comes in her final chapter, "The Painting Exhibition," where she describes the painter at work. "We leave him to his misfortune, to that infernal obligation that outstrips any commentary, any metaphor to his own story struggling in the continent of silence." Duras's theory of the written word would rob her life's work of the magic she has so masterfully created over alifetime. Rereading "The Lover" might be the only antidote to so much discomfort.

Kirkus Reviews

"Writing displays Duras’s unique, detailed perception to reveal great reverence for human life and respect for memory. An enthralling book." —Library Journal

From the Publisher