The War: A Memoir

by Marguerite Duras

Book Overview

From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras's haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was torn asunder

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565842219
• ISBN13: 9781565842212
• Release Date: August 1994
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Very powerful, personal view of the German Occupation

This memoir is a very heartfelt testiment to love, longing, hunger, suspicion, pain and regret. It is always a treat when a writer of Duras' caliber is witness to extraordinary events and the reader is pulled along as she desperately tries to find out information about her imprisoned husband. The fact that the episodes are presented out of order is slightly disconcerting I felt in the sense that the book becomes a collection of several periods rather than a linear narrative.

A Monument Not a Diary

"Memoirists who reveal turbulent pasts are faulted for exhibitionism," writes Greg Lichtenberg in his essay, "Life is also Here: Toward a Manifesto of Memoir," while those with superficially quiet lives are blamed for having no story." Marguerite Duras has a profound story to tell, whether it's exhibitionism or not. Her intent, which has a much larger scope than a memoir with the structure of a simple diary, seemes to be to humanize and personalize the wartime chaos and utter dehumanization of 1940s France under Nazi domination. She sets a record about the Holocaust. She makes a monument rather than writes a diary. This is why her memoir rises above those that Lichtenberg criticizes, those that "seem a pornography of emotions, offering up whatever excess of misery will provoke a fleeting response"; what he calls, "a talk-show between book covers." The War is crafted not written. You won't find mind-numbing cliches but only imaginative language. And the language will move you.