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“... writer, despite her excellent taste as a reader – she loved magical realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as a genre is more ...”

“... or Gaullist or something similar. It was now that Mitterrand’s path crossed that of Marguerite Duras, a young writer of the brand-new Fourth Republic, who never subsequently made any mystery of the fact that in the year of grace 1944 she felt no scruples about torturing the imprisoned collaborators over whom she was watching. The political ...”

“... prominent. As if there were not enough drama in Christine Villemin’s predicament, the novelist Marguerite Duras intervened with an extraordinary article. This was no sordid crime, she wrote. It was an act that only women could understand, whereby Christine, suffering in a society where men made all the laws, took sublime vengeance, like a modern ...”

“... towards the French experimental novel but indifference to outmoded German ‘New Objectivity’. Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous get in, but not Vicki Baum nor Ayn Rand (hers particularly I find an extraordinary omission). Catharine Stimpson (last year’s MLA president) gets in on the basis of some feminist literary criticism and a ‘a lesbian ...”

“... by a swimming pool while she is wearing a pair of water-wings branded with the legend nivea cream. Marguerite Duras buys her suppositories; Shirley MacLaine reads her palm and declares that she has been ‘mother and prostitute, many times’. It does not, in life or literature, get better than this. (‘Edna won’t reveal which passage of her eventful ...”

“... films it happens, were released: Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, the Alain Resnais/Marguerite Duras Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Antonioni’s L’Avventura – each associated with a question about whether something new might happen (Samuel Beckett’s Godot and Endgame were still new), shadowed by the question whether love is an exhausted ...”

“... lines went out on Paris National Radio on 12 January 1957 in a broadcast of Le Square, adapted by Marguerite Duras from her novel of the same name. A stage version of this ruminative two-hander – a discussion of unhappiness between a young housemaid-cum-nanny and a middle-aged travelling salesman, who get talking on a bench in a quiet Paris square ...”

“... New York) as well as a long-serving translator who has rendered Raymond Roussel, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras and many others. ‘A good translation,’ he writes, ‘offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the score, one ...”

“... a late modernist to include in a course on 20th-century French women writers would probably choose Marguerite Duras over Sarraute. Recently, Annabel Kim, in Unbecoming Language, suggested that Sarraute’s anti-identitarianism can be read as a kind of commitment to a radical equality, in ways that anticipate the feminisms of Monique Wittig and Anne ...”

“... the Rambouillet forest, where he’s discovered a factory that does nothing but pulp the novels of Marguerite Duras, ‘a writer of the Eighties’. As he explains: ‘This occupation doesn’t amuse my valet, he thinks it’s unhealthy, he says: “Why do you have it in for this poor woman?”’ Guibert’s last book, Le Paradis, was written during the ...”

“... English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and smallness work well with limited resources, or because its irony ...”

“... with other women about a ‘woman’s cinema’. Akerman is slouching on a sofa, along from Marguerite Duras; they are separated by Duras’s handbag and a packet of cigarettes, which Akerman chain-smokes, bringing her palm to cover her face each time she inhales. She is both self-assured and adolescent: she ...”

“... to publication the novels of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget and Marguerite Duras, who were soon known as the ‘école de Minuit’. These writers drew on different models, but with their detached sensibility and rejection of 19th-century dramatic conventions, they had enough in common for Emile Henriot of Le Monde to ...”

“... Consent’s place in a long tradition of autofictional writing on abuse and the age gap, of which Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Christine Angot’s Incest are the most famous examples. In the narrative, Springora refers to Matzneff using the initial ‘G.’ – though it is unmistakably him – while she refers to herself sometimes as ...”

“... in that week’s Nouvel Observateur that, along with Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig and Marguerite Duras – as well as Olga, her own sister, and dozens of secretaries, office workers and housewives – she had had an abortion. She marched on the Assemblée Nationale with the MLF, let them hold meetings at her flat, read the SCUM manifesto, The ...”