Wartime Notebooks by Marguerite Duras

The posthumous publication of a writer’s early notebooks and drafts can often feel like a cynical opportunity, or a desk-clearing exercise of little interest to anyone other than the specialist. The glimpse behind the curtain of artistic creation might profit the publisher, but rarely the general reader. These extraordinary notebooks though, written between 1943 and 1949 and explicitly grouped together by a woman who was to become one of the most important figures in post-war French literature, contain essentially the raw material of her entire career.

Duras was a writer who obsessively mined her early experiences in Indochina and occupied France, returning again and again to themes of romantic betrayal, captive sensuality, and existential choice. Autobiographical sketches share space with rough drafts of later stories and novellas, all written during a period of intense trauma for the writer and her country. Being only the notes for those later limpid and fiercely controlled works, these notebooks are necessarily uneven and clumsy in parts. But they offer a vivid insight into the personal demons that haunted an exceptional writer, and in their own way present an opaque portrait of France at a moment of catastrophic change and upheaval. [Richard Strachan]