Writing I Am Not Sure What to Make Of

 A name I have come to learn is Marguerite Duras, A French writer. I sense someone I ought to be reading, one who might be teaching me something. Seven Stories Press is publishing a book of hers, and has provided a glimpse into the book.

Having read Excerpt: No More / C’est Tout by Marguerite Duras, I am not sure what to make of her. This is from the Translator's Note:

It was Chateaubriand who initiated a literature explicitly from the other side, posthumous writing, d’outre-tombe. There are subsequent French instances — Drieu La Rochelle’s Récit secret, Gide’s mortuary pillow-book Ainsi soit-il, some late Jouhandeau, quite a lot of Montherlant, perhaps Céline’s last three volumes — the mere instancing of these ominous names suggests the ethical risk of such an enterprise. Who makes book here — isn’t there always someone else, someone not entirely to be trusted who will have to collect the disjecta verba, to straighten things out —in Duras’s case her last young lover, appearing so mysteriously as a gruesome interlocutor, the angel of death masked as the last coital gasp, drowning out all foregoing competition during these inter-comatose manifestations of that special literary fanaticism which asserts not merely that this is happening (after all, Duras has written a hundred works, novels, stories, plays, films; expression is her trade) but that this is happening to me!

This is a kind of writing I do not recognize in America. Or have I missed something?

sch 3/16 

Today, LitHub provided The End of Desire: Christiane Blot-Labarrère on Marguerite Duras’s No More by Christiane Blot-Labarrère:

There is no paradise in Marguerite Duras. Not even a literary paradise in which words might find an eternal felicity. She has not concealed her nos­talgia for such a thing. But although not Edenic, her writing is at least redemptive. Life and literary invention accommodate themselves miracu­lously in the enthusiasm of a nascent inspiration: brief, intense moments of grace, of inexpressible joys; a door open onto infinity, even onto immortality.

No More brings Marguerite Duras into confrontation with the ulti­mately alien nature of death. Without vanishing, the perspective constantly deviates. The book gives an impression of breathlessness, of a visionary spirit exhausted from vertigo, overwhelmed by a melancholy that dimin­ishes the murmur of words.

Yes, she interest me. Would that I had time for al that interested me.

sch 3/22/23