6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
shedding light on the shadows?, March 7, 2001
This review is from: Marguerite Duras: A Life (Hardcover)
Laure Adler has written a biography of Ms. Duras that is both compelling and confounding, and although I appreciated her considerable efforts, I finished the book probably "knowing" less about Duras than when I started.
No doubt this can be somewhat attributed to the contradictions that appear to have been a staple of Duras's life and conscience. If Ms. Adler is to be believed, Duras was the most conflicted and Protean artist of the 20th century, forever shape-shifting and believing opposites at once. For every bit of evidence Ms. Adler offers about Duras being X, she offers (at least) a Y and Z stating almost the exact opposite proposition. So I constantly found myself asking, Was she X, Y, or Z?
If she was indeed all three, then I would like the biographer to step in and make some comment to sum up the disparate parts. Rarely, if ever, does Ms. Adler see this as her function. She faithfully details the facts of Duras's life and works, but she (almost) never comments or crystallizes them. We are told on the dust jacket that Ms. Adler has been trained as an historian and as a journalist, and it is decidedly the latter profession that seems to dominate her scrutinization of Duras. Plenty of facts are offered. There is plenty of thesis and antithesis depicted, but we never seem to attain any synthesis, leaving us in the world of reportage rather than biography.
Adler does triumph in her depiction of postwar Paris in the forties and fifties. Here, she is fully in historical mode and offers readers fascinating insight into the personalities and politics of the time. Rarely have I seen such an enlightened discussion of the artistic and political Zeitgeist of that particular era. The cast of characters and their interactions are well defined and amusingly recounted. If only the remainder of the book had been so incisive.
As a feminist--or at least I would suppose she is, given that she has written a number of histories of women--Ms. Adler should be chided for her somewhat myopic concentration on Duras. One criticism that feminists constantly leveled against male biographers in the 70s and 80s was that they only chose other males as their subjects and, once chosen, only unearthed their connections to other males--and their power games, professional lifes, etc., thereby giving short shrift to personal relationships with wifes, lovers, families, etc. Here Adler discusses at length Duras's relationship with her mother, which was indeed a pivotal one, as borne out in her books and films. However, Adler fails to adequately explain the motivations or even the emotions of the males around Duras. Considering that Duras started a long-term affair with another man (Mascolo) while her husband (Anthelme) was in a concentration camp, and then kept the affair going for years afterward while the men became best of friends, we learn startingly little about how these men felt about this fact or how they accommodated it into their lives. Later on, Ms. Adler talks of Duras's relationship with her son, but this discussion is mainly held to one chapter that investigates their lives while her son was a boy. We rarely learn how the two got along as adults, which strikes me as an omission, given that it must be of some interest how the son of a major artist would respond to a mother who was so adored and reviled in her own lifetime--and who must have been difficult to live with, as an artist, an alcoholic, and a woman who self-defined around the substantial number of men who occupied important places in her sexual and intellectual lives.
In sum, I enjoyed the book and think that Ms. Adler has done some very impressive work. At the same time, given the access she received to personal materials from major players in Duras's life--including her husbands--she could have done so much more if she had expanded her vision and chose to move beyond mere journalism. If you want to know various facts of Duras's life, you may well enjoy this biography. If you want to walk away from the book with a definitive sense of who Duras was--if you want to draw back the curatin and let some new light in--perhaps you should go elsewhere. Duras, we find in this biography, was a woman of many parts. Unfortunately, Ms. Adler does not give us an adequate picture of what she was as a whole. In the end, extensive reading of Duras's work may provide a better sense of who she was, despite all her trickery and deceit, than this biography could hope to accomplish.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Coming Closer to the Mystery That Is Duras, April 17, 2001
This review is from: Marguerite Duras: A Life (Hardcover)
Laure Adler's book comes close, but no book will ever come close enough. Duras' fans will undoubtedly read anything written about her, so anxious are they for shimmers of truth regarding the woman who left such a perplexing legacy of literature. Adler's biography of the fascinating French writer is good and it is certainly much more revealing than say, Alain Vircondolet's DURAS which might be more of a pleasure to read (he took Duras up on a challenge to try and write as she did), but says far less about the woman.
There are times when Adler's sentence structure seems choppy, and this may be hard for more sophisticated readers, but bear in mind that although Anne-Marie Glasheen seems to have made a suitable translation, translations can be difficult and something is almost always lost.
The emphasis here should really be on content and Adler did a fair job considering the difficulty in separating the real Duras from the invented one. For those looking merely for facts, Adler clears up the myth around THE LOVER, does a superb job of showing Duras through the war years, and gives a reasonable look at her friendship with Mitterand. One will miss an in-depth report on her relations with her family and will undoubtedly want to know more - especially about the elusive younger brother. As we read we become struck by the presence of men in Duras' life, and we yearn a bit for insights from a close woman friend. Unfortunately, Duras did not seem to allow many women into her life.
Adler's book is recommended for any fan of Duras' literature as it will at least give some insight - possibly new - into her working mind. But don't expect miracles. And expect more books forthcoming. Duras' son, Outa, is a rather silent voice in this book and one can't help but think that there is part of Marguerite alive in the world who has not yet spoken (written) his thoughts.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Was Marguerite Duras a heroine or a monster?, December 7, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Marguerite Duras: A Life (Hardcover)
Was Marguerite Duras a heroine or a monster? If Adler is to be believed, the famous French writer and filmmaker was both. This is a fascinating story of a woman who was alternately a patriot and a traitor during WWII. (She slept with the enemy, a Nazi sympathizer, to further her own career and simultaneously worked for the French Resistance.) She wrote sizzling, steamy fiction that she claimed chronicled her own, true adventures as a young femme fatale growing up in Indochina, as a student in Paris, as a radical politician and literary maven. She could be generous and loyal to a fault, or, in the blink of an eye, turn into a raging, arrogant harpy.
If the truth is stranger than fiction, then Duras was even more monstrous than the characters in her novels. This is the story, wonderfully told, of a truly sick ticket indeed.
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