Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras, pseudonym of Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (Gia Định, near Saigon, Vietnam, April 4, 1914-Paris, March 3, 1996), was a French novelist, screenwriter and film director.

Biography

She was born in Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), while the region was part of French Indochina, on April 4, 1914. She spent her childhood and adolescence with her mother in Indochina, an experience that marked her profoundly and inspired many of his works.

At the age of eighteen, in 1932, he emigrated to France, where he studied Law, Mathematics, and Political Science. She worked as a secretary in the Colonial Ministry from 1935 to 1941.

He changed his surname in 1943 to that of a village in Lot-et-Garonne, where his parents' home was (his father left teaching in the colonies and returned to France with the two children from his previous marriage).

She married Robert Antelme in 1939. She had a son who died in 1942. That year, she Duras met Dionys Mascolo, who ended up being her lover, and with whom she had another child. During World War II, she participated in the French Resistance. Her group fell behind an ambush; Marguerite managed to escape with the help of François Mitterrand, but Robert Antelme was captured and sent to a concentration camp on June 1, 1944.

In 1945, despite her desire to divorce, when Robert returned in poor conditions from the Dachau camp, she stayed with him to take care of him, a fact that she will recount in her late novel Pain (La douleur). She divorced in 1946. She was a member of the Communist Party from which she was expelled in 1955.

His first novels, Les impudents (1943) and La vie tranquille (1944), reflect a certain Anglo-Saxon narrative influence; later it evolved towards the forms of the "nouveau roman", as in L'après-midi de M. Andesmas, from 1960.

He became more widely known with the publication of an autobiographically inspired novel, A dike against the Pacific (1950), which elaborates childhood memories. His later works highlight, in short stories, the anguish and desire of the characters who try to escape loneliness.

His great novels are Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, 1964; Le Vice-consul, 1966; L'Amante Anglaise, 1967; Détruire, dit-elle, 1969; L'Amour, 1971; and the text India Song, 1973, which includes characters from Le Vice-consul and which he later made into the cinema in an exceptional way.

With The lover (1984) he won the Prix Goncourt. It is a more accessible novel, with which he achieved worldwide success, with more than three million copies sold and translated into forty languages. There she takes up a memory of adolescence and elaborates it in a fictional way. She turned it back on him in L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, from 1991.

His literary work includes some forty novels and a dozen plays. Her dramatic career was recognized in 1983 by the French Academy with the Grand Prix du Theater. Marguerite Duras wrote the book Hiroshima, mon amour which served as the basis for the film of the same name directed by Alain Resnais, 1958. Duras wrote the script. She also directed several films, including India Song, and The Children.

The writer's own life is a novel that she has written about endlessly. Destruction, love, social alienation, are key words in the life of Marguerite Duras that are detected in all of her work. A stormy story, of loneliness and writing, of words and silences, of flashing desires as well. An inescapable character in the life of Marguerite Duras: her mother. Her maternal lack of love marked her entire life and made her a controversial character in which the demands of the heart and the whims of the body were intermingled; impetuous and stubborn, she had as many detractors as followers of her works.

It's hard to define her personality: angry or sweet, genius or narcissistic, but you have to believe her when she says: "I am a writer, nothing more is worth saying". In fact, C & # 39; est tout , from 1995, was her last text.

"For the world to be bearable, it is necessary to exorcise obsessions, but writing can both hide and reveal them". So Duras gropes, repeats over and over again, looking for the right word, "test" writing, how it proves to love even knowing that it will never be fully achieved. Marguerite said: "Writing is trying to know what one would write if one wrote." "Writing has always been the only thing that filled my life, the only thing that separated me from madness," he confessed in his 1993 essay "Writing." His novels are arranged around a central explosion, an instant of violence that gives way to speech: Hiroshima and love, death and symbolic psychic desire intermingled "Destroy, she says. And this phrase is similar to music, it always comes back, it is the infinite variation on a theme, it is a litany and celebration, control and debauchery". She has recovered very important youthful writings, such as the War Notebooks and Other Texts , in 2006, and some Italian interviews in 2012.

Acknowledgments and posthumous tributes

• In 2012 he was screened at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in the framework of a feminist film cycle his film Cesarée (1978) and the short Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979).

• Between 4 April and 9 May 2014 on the occasion of the double anniversary of Marguerite Duras in 2014 (the centenary of his birth and the thirty years of his work L'Amant) various activities were carried out in the city of Buenos Aires organized by the Directorate General of the Book, Libraries and Promotion of Reading, French Alliance of Buenos Aires and Malba-Fundación Costantini.
• Between 12 March and 2 October 2022 was introduced La Virreina Centre de la Imatge de Barcelona, "the first exhibition dedicated to Marguerite Duras in the Spanish state and the only retrospective of a museum character that, so far and in the international sphere, runs through the whole of his literary, film and television work." This exhibition, curated by Valentín Roma, coincided in time with a series of author films in the Filmoteca de Catalunya (8 March- 8 April).

Work

• Les impudentsPlon, 1943. Tr.: The impudence
• La vie reassureleGallimard, 1944. Tr.: Quiet life.
• A barge contre le PacifiqueGallimard, 1950. Tr.: A Dike Against the Pacific
• Le marin de GibraltarGallimard, 1950. Tr.: The sailor of Gibraltar.
• Les petits chevaux de TarquiniaGallimard, 1953. Tr.: The little horses of Tarquinia
• Des journées entières dans les arbres, Le Boa, Madame Dodin, Les ChantiersGallimard, 1954.
• Le SquareGallimard, 1955. Tr.: Square
• Moderato Cantabile, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958. Tr.: Moderato Cantabile
• Les viaducs de la Seine et OiseGallimard, 1959.
• Hiroshima mon amourGallimard, 1960. Tr.: Hiroshima mon amour
• L'après-midi de M. AndesmasGallimard, 1960. Tr.: The afternoon of M. Andesmas
• Le ravissement de Lol V. SteinGallimard, 1964.: Lol V. Stein's rapture
• Theatre I: Les Eaux et Forêts-le Square-La MúsicaGallimard, 1965.
• Le Vice-consulGallimard, 1966. Tr.: The vice consul.
• L'Amante AnglaiseGallimard, 1967. Tr.: The English lover.
• Theatre II: Suzanna Andler-Des journées entières dans les arbres-Yes, peut-être-Le Shaga-A human est venu me voirGallimard, 1968.
• Détruire, dit-elleMinuit, 1969. Tr.: Destroy, he says.
• Abahn Sabana DavidGallimard, 1970. Tr.: Abahn Sabana David
• L'AmourGallimard, 1971. Tr. Love
• « Ah! Ernesto»Hatlin Quist, 1971.
• India SongGallimard, 1973. Tr. India song.
• Nathalie Grangerfollowed by The Femme du GangeGallimard, 1973.
• Les parleusesMinuit, 1974, talks with Xavière Gauthier.
• Le camionfollowed by Entretien avec Michelle PorteMinuit, 1977.
• L'Eden cinémaMercure de France, 1977.
• Le Navire Nightfollowed by Césarée, Les Mains négatives, Aurélia SteinerMercure de France, 1979.
• Vera Baxter ou les plages de l'AtlantiqueAlbatros, 1980. Tr.: Vera Baxter
• L'Homme assis dans le couloirMinuit, 1980. Tr. The man sitting in the hall
• L'Eté 80Minuit, 1980. Tr.: The summer of '80s, Bid & co., 2010.
• Les Yeux verts, in Les Cahiers du cinémaNo. 312-313, June 1980 and new expanded edition, 1987.
• Agatha, Minuit, 1981, theater (following Musil).
• OutsideAlbin Michel, 1981.
• L'Homme atlantiqueMinuit, 1982.
• Savannah Bay, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982 (in 1983).
• The maladie of the mortMinuit, 1982. Tr. The evil of death
• Theatre III: -La Bête dans la jungleaccording to the text of H. James, adapted by J. Lord and M. Duras,Les Papiers d'Aspernaccording to the text of H. James, adaptation of M. Duras and R. Antelme,-The Danse of mortaccording to the piece of August Strindberg, adaptation of M. Duras, Gallimard, 1984.
• L'AmantMinuit, 1984. Tr. The lover.
• La douleurPOL, 1985. Tr. The pain
• The music deuxièmeGallimard, 1985.
• Les yeux bleus cheveux noirsMinuit, 1986. Tr. Blue eyes, black hair
• The fuck of the Norman countMinuit, 1986.
• The vie materiellePOL, 1987. Tr. The material lifeessays.
• Emily L.Minuit, 1987.
• The pluie d'étéPOL, 1990.
• L'Amant de la Chine du NordGallimard, 1991.
• Yan Andrea SteinerPOL, 1992. Tr. Yan Andrea Steiner
• ÉcrireGallimard, 1993. Tr. Write
• C'est toutPOL, 1995. Tr. This is it.
• The mer ecriteMarval, 1996, with photographs of Hélène Bamberger.
• Cahiers de guerre et autres textesPOL, 2006, MD files (texts 1943 and 1949)
• Le boureau de poste de la rue DupinGallimard, 2006, interviews with François Mitterrand.
• The passion suspended, Le Seuil, 2012, interviews with Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre (or Italian, 1987)
• Le Dernier des métiers (2016), Le Seuil, 2016; interviews.

Filmography

• 1967: Music
• 1969: Détruire, dit-elle
• 1972: Jaune le soleil
• 1972: Nathalie Granger
• 1974: The Femme du Gange
• 1975: India Song
• 1976: Des journées entières dans les arbres
• 1976: Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert
• 1977: Le Camion
• 1977: Les Plages de l'Atlantique (Baxter, Vera Baxter)
• 1978: Les Mains négatives (short)
• 1978: Cesarée
• 1979: Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (short)
• 1979: Le Navire Night
• 1981: Agatha et les lectures illimitées
• 1981: L'Homme atlantique
• 1982: Il Diálogo di Roma (documentary)
• 1984: Les Enfants

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards