Marguerite Duras

Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914, in Gia Định, Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam). Her parents, Marie (née Legrand, 1877–1956) and Henri Donnadieu (1872–1921), were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School. They both had previous marriages. Marguerite had two brothers: Pierre, the older, and the younger Paul. Duras' father fell ill and he returned to France, where he died in 1921, when Duras was seven years old. Between 1922 and 1924, the family lived in France while her mother was on administrative leave. They then moved back to French Indochina when she was posted to Phnom Penh followed by Vĩnh Long and Sa Đéc. The family struggled financially, and her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of rice farmland in Prey Nob, After finishing her studies in 1937, she found employment with the French government at the Ministry of the Colonies. In 1939, she married the writer Robert Antelme, whom she had met during her studies. In 1950, her mother returned to France from Indochina, wealthy from property investments and from the boarding school she had run. ==Career==

Duras was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays, and works of short fiction, including her best-selling, highly fictionalized autobiographical work ''L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover, which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese-Vietnamese man. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other books: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover'', produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, was released in 1992. Duras's novel The Sea Wall was first adapted into the 1958 film This Angry Age by René Clément, and again in 2008 by Cambodian director Rithy Panh as The Sea Wall. Other major works include Moderato Cantabile (1958), which was the basis of the 1960 film Seven Days... Seven Nights; Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964); and her play India Song, which Duras herself later directed as a film in 1975. She was also the screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais. Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form, and were criticized for their "romanticism" by fellow writer Raymond Queneau; however, with Moderato Cantabile, she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the nouveau roman French literary movement, although she did not belong definitively to any one group. She was noted for her command of dialogue. In 1971, Duras signed the Manifesto of the 343, thereby publicly announcing that she had had an abortion. According to literature and film scholars Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Robert P. Kolker, Duras' provocative cinema between 1973 and 1983 was concerned with a single "ideal" image, at the same time both "an absolute vacant image and an absolute meaningful image," while also focused on the verbal text. They said her films purposely lacked realistic representation, such as divorcing image from sound and using space symbolically. Many of her works, such as Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and ''L'Homme assis dans le couloir'' (1980), deal with human sexuality. Towards the end of her life, Duras published a short, 54-page autobiographical book as a goodbye to her readers and family. The last entry was written on 1 August 1995 and read "I think it is all over. That my life is finished. I am no longer anything. I have become an appalling sight. I am falling apart. Come quickly. I no longer have a mouth, no longer a face". Duras died at her home in Paris on 3 March 1996, aged 81. ==Personal life==

During the later stages of World War II, she endured separation from her husband, Robert Antelme, following his imprisonment in Buchenwald. It was during his captivity that she wrote La Douleur. Believing that fidelity was an absurd notion, Duras began an affair with writer Dionys Mascolo while still married to Antelme, creating a ménage à trois, he later fathered her son, Jean Mascolo. Duras had a wide circle of influential friends, ranging from writers and artists to intellectuals and even criminals. Her friend, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, once remarked, "Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me," in praise of her novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. During the final two decades of her life, Duras experienced significant health problems. In 1980, she was hospitalized for the first time due to a combination of alcohol and tranquilizers. In parallel with her health issues during the 1980s, Duras began a relationship with Yann Andréa, a homosexual actor. Duras' health continued to decline in the 1990s. She died on 3 March 1996. == Reception and legacy ==

Samuel Beckett regarded first hearing the 1957 radio adaptation of Le Square as "overwhelmingly moving" and a significant moment in his life. The account by Yann Andréa of his relationship with Duras was brought to the screen in a 2022 Claire Simon film entitled Vous ne désirez que moi (a phrase directed at Andréa by Duras) with Swann Arlaud as Andréa and Emmanuelle Devos as journalist Michèle Manceaux, subsequently issued on DVD by Blaq Out. Duras appears fictionalized in one of the stories of Fiona Sze-Lorrain's novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023). ==Bibliography==

, with pens, pencils, and feathers, in and around, potted plants, on her grave. Director • La Musica (1967) • Destroy, She Said (1969) • Jaune le soleil (1972) • Nathalie Granger (1972) • La Femme du Gange (1974) • India Song (1975) • Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976) • Des journées entières dans les arbres (1977) • Le Camion (1977) • Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) • Les Mains négatives (1978) • Césarée (1978) • Le Navire Night (1979) • Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979) • Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979) • Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) • ''L'Homme atlantique'' (1981) • Il dialogo di Roma (1983) • Les Enfants (1985) Actor • India Song (1975) – (voice) • The Lorry (1977) – Elle • Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) – Narrator (voice, uncredited) • Le Navire Night (1979) – (voice) • Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979) – Narrator (voice) • Every Man for Himself (1980) – (voice) • Agatha et les Lectures illimitées (1981) – (voice) • Les Enfants (1985) – Narration (voice, uncredited) (final film role) == Awards and honors ==

• 1958: Prix de Mai for Moderato cantabile • 1962: Prix de la Tribune de Paris for ''L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas'' • 1972: Official selection at Venice Film Festival for the film Nathalie Granger • 1975: Prix de l'Association française des cinémas d'art et d'essai à Cannes for India Song • 1976: Prix Jean-Cocteau for the film Des journées entières dans les arbres • 1983: Grand prix du théâtre de l'Académie française • 1984: Prix Goncourt for ''L'Amant'' • 1986: Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for The Lover ==References==