Brookline Books/Lumen Editions

Writing 

Written in the splendid bareness of her late style, these pages are Marguerite Duras' theory of literature. Comparing a dying fly to the work of style, remembering the trance and incurable disarray of writing, recreating the last moments of a British pilot shot during World War II and buried next to her house, or else letting out a magisterial So what? to question six decades of story telling, all operate as a deceitful, yet indespensable confession.

Born in 1914 in French Indochina, Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important 20th-century literary figures, is perhaps best known in the U.S. for her screenplay Hiroshima, Mon Amour and her novel The Lover, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt and was made into a widely acclaimed film released in 1992. Mme. Duras died on the fourth of March, 1996.