The War: A Memoir [Paperback]

Marguerite Duras (Author), Barbara Bray (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1994

An elegant new paperback edition of one of Marguerite Duras's most important books.

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 François 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).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important writers, was a member of the French Resistance movement throughout the Second World War. Written in 1944 but not published until 1985, this is her compelling personal story of living in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation.

From Publishers Weekly

In Nazi-occupied France during WW II, Duras (The Lovers; Hiroshima, Mon Amour was a major figure in the Resistance. During the chaos attending the liberation of Paris in 1944 she wrote a diaryhitherto unpublished and long-forgotten by herwhich forms the opening and major segment of this short, memorable book. Here, unrevised, in vivid staccato prose that sears with its emotion, is an account of her agonized waiting at the Gare d'Orsay and elsewhere for the arrival of her husband, Robert L., who (she learned from Resistance contacts including "Morland," in actuality Francois Mitterrand), was among newly liberated POWs found in Belsen and other death camps. That Robert L. arrived home more dead than alive proved devastating to Duras; it will strike readers no less powerfully. This volume, which includes with the diary war recollections treated as stories and an account about a Gestapo agent in Paris, rates a special place among WW II memoirs.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (August 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565842219
• ISBN-13: 978-1565842212
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #182,344 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Monument Not a Diary, May 8, 2001

By 

Ken (Tucson, Arizona) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The War: A Memoir (Paperback)

"Memoirists who reveal turbulent pasts are faulted for exhibitionism," writes Greg Lichtenberg in his essay, "Life is also Here: Toward a Manifesto of Memoir," while those with superficially quiet lives are blamed for having no story." Marguerite Duras has a profound story to tell, whether it's exhibitionism or not. Her intent, which has a much larger scope than a memoir with the structure of a simple diary, seemes to be to humanize and personalize the wartime chaos and utter dehumanization of 1940s France under Nazi domination. She sets a record about the Holocaust. She makes a monument rather than writes a diary. This is why her memoir rises above those that Lichtenberg criticizes, those that "seem a pornography of emotions, offering up whatever excess of misery will provoke a fleeting response"; what he calls, "a talk-show between book covers." The War is crafted not written. You won't find mind-numbing cliches but only imaginative language. And the language will move you.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very powerful, personal view of the German Occupation, November 28, 2006

By 

robbieandrose (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The War: A Memoir (Paperback)

This memoir is a very heartfelt testiment to love, longing, hunger, suspicion, pain and regret. It is always a treat when a writer of Duras' caliber is witness to extraordinary events and the reader is pulled along as she desperately tries to find out information about her imprisoned husband. The fact that the episodes are presented out of order is slightly disconcerting I felt in the sense that the book becomes a collection of several periods rather than a linear narrative.