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Overview
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).
Duras' stunning memoirs of her life in Paris during WWII as a member of the Resistance network headed by Francois Mitterand.
Synopsis
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).
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 During the chaos attending the liberation of Paris in 1944 she wrote a diaryhitherto unpublished and long-forgotten by herwhich forms the opening and major segment of this short, memorable book.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. (April 30)