About the Author

Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 in Giadinh, Vietnam to French parents, both teachers. She went to live in Paris at eighteen and studied mathematics, law, and political science at the Sorbonne. In 1935, she became a civil servant in the Ministry for Colonial Affairs. During WWII, she was active in the Resistance and in 1945 she joined the Communist Party. She wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959). In 1984, her internationally bestselling novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt. In addition to making a dozen films, Duras wrote more than 45 novels and plays over the course of her life.

Mark Polizzotti has translated the work of Jean Echenoz, Gustave Flaubert, André Breton, Christian Oster, in addition to Duras’ novel Writing in 1998 (Lumen Editions). He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (FSG) and is director of publications at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited will be released this fall with Continuum.

Reviews

Once again Mark Polizzotti has produced a masterly rendering of a modern French classic. —Harry Mathews

Marguerite Duras’s voice, whenever we hear it, always goes straight for our hearts. —Le Monde Diplomatique

This Duras is deeply Duras. Her sentences grow alarmed if they grow longer than a line, yet there seems nothing to be alarmed about since they are apparently as empty as a road at sunrise. Then suddenly you arrive at your destination: a forest of feeling. You think, I have been here before, yet I recognize nothing. Whose trees are these? That is because only Duras’ entire oeuvre could have composed this text. The translation is lovely. —William H. Gass

Duras manages to combine the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives of confession and objectivity, of lyrical poetry and nouveau roman. The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader’s mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought... —New York Times Book Review, on The Lover

Marguerite Duras conjures images, memories, and sensations out of the air and into a series of freely associated essays. One can sense the pleasure this 20th-century literary giant felt in setting off onto this ethereal odyssey...Mark Polizzotti’s translation is a joy in itself. —Boston Magazine, on Writing

It is the summer of 1980, the summer that brought solidarity to Gdansk, Poland. A young man fleeing his own demons arrives at a Normandy seaside resort to meet ``a woman old already and crazy with writing.'' She is famous and alone; he is a knowing child. Their love story forms the core of this mesmerizing narrative in which the injustice of world events sinks into a larger pool of evil that haunts both him and her: the Nazis' murder of Jews in World World II. Duras's tribute to the young lover, Steiner, glides seamlessly (translated by the intrepid Bray) into an all-embracing Durasian allegory of desire and the sea. The writer has daily observed a child camper and his teenaged counselor on the beach; as the writer and her lover grow closer, they are transformed in the narrative into this young couple knocking against the mysteries that engulf them. Duras remains perplexing, frank, and marvelous; this work will speak to avid readers of her work.-- Amy Boaz, ``Library Journal''

Once again Mark Polizzotti has produced a masterly rendering of a modern French classic. -Harry Mathews

Marguerite Duras's voice, whenever we hear it, always goes straight for our hearts. -Le Monde Diplomatique

This Duras is deeply Duras. Her sentences grow alarmed if they grow longer than a line, yet there seems nothing to be alarmed about since they are apparently as empty as a road at sunrise. Then suddenly you arrive at your destination: a forest of feeling. You think, I have been here before, yet I recognize nothing. Whose trees are these? That is because only Duras' entire oeuvre could have composed this text. The translation is lovely. -William H. Gass

Duras manages to combine the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives of confession and objectivity, of lyrical poetry and nouveau roman. The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader's mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought... -New York Times Book Review, on The Lover

Marguerite Duras conjures images, memories, and sensations out of the air and into a series of freely associated essays. One can sense the pleasure this 20th-century literary giant felt in setting off onto this ethereal odyssey...Mark Polizzotti's translation is a joy in itself. -Boston Magazine, on Writing