This marvelous author wrote this book based on a journal she kept during World War II, and it is powerful.

It is not comfortable reading. This book is gritty; her perceptions when she wrote the journal, like her perceptions when she put together this book, were stark, clear & nightmarish, her reactions raw, grim & terrible.

I have long liked Duras; she was a thinker as well as a writer. This is well worth the time for reading this short book. ( )

Almost immediately, I started to imagine one aspect of my review of this bk: "Anything I write about this will trivialize it. Giving this a rating will trivialize it." It begins w/ a diary of her anguish as she awaits the return of her husband, "Robert L." (Robert Anselme) from the concentration camp(s) that he's been put into after being caught as a Resistance member. The uncertainty, Has he been shot?, Has he been left in a ditch?, is maddening. The struggle for resolution, to learn about his whereabouts. Later in the bk (& earlier in the story) she describes her interactions w/ the Gestapo agent who'd arrested her husband in the 1st place. Eventually, it's her job, as a Resistance member as well, to identify this man & have him executed or, as it turns out, arrested & tried. Each autobiographical tale & the sparse fiction inspired by real experiences of the Resistance to Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s is stunning in its directness, in its sad educational value. Now I reckon I must read Anselme's own bk, "The Human Race" (in translation) - an outgrowth of the concentration camp experiences he barely survived. ( )

Editora Círculo do Livro

Een verzameling van 6 korte verhalen, waarvan er zeker 2, mogelijk 3 autobiografisch zijn. Duras zelf beweerde dat het geschriften waren die ze kort na de Tweede Wereldoorlog schreef, maar vergat; pas in 1985 werden ze gepubliceerd. Vooral het eerste verhaal is een echte stomp in de maag, ik kan het niet anders omschrijven. Het situeert zich grotendeels in april-juni 1945 en beschrijft de staat van verwachting, wanhoop en koortsige verwarring van een vrouw (duidelijk Duras zelf) die in Parijs wacht op de mogelijke terugkeer van haar man Robert uit een Duits concentratiekamp. Vooral de beschrijving van de fragiele staat van Robert en zijn hachelijk herstel grijpen naar de keel. Het verhaal krijgt een extra dimensie door het korte optreden van François Mitterrand die de verzetscel leidde waarvan Robert deel uitmaakte. Sinds Primo Levi’s “Is dit een mens?” greep geen enkel ander oorlogsverhaal mij zo aan.
Ook het tweede verhaal, over haar omgang met een Gestapo-medewerker terwijl ze actief is in het verzet, gaat blijkbaar terug op ware feiten en schetst knap de sfeer van onzekerheid en de schemerzone waarin het verzet moest opereren. Het derde verhaal beschrijft de hardhandige ondervraging van een mogelijk verklikker door het verzet. Ook daarin valt de rauwe stijl op. De andere verhalen zijn fictioneel en lijken eerder stijloefeningen dan volwaardige novelles. Een beklijvend boekje! ( )

Reviewed in conjunction with Roughneck by Jim Thompson


Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel ashamed of your life, every time you thought you were unlucky or that you deserve more or that you should get more. Whatever you have suffered, however genuine it be, suddenly becomes as nothing, its place clearly fixed in the universe as the measliest dot the world ever has seen. Roughneck does that. It describes a portion of his life in the pared down, straightforward way Thompson tells all his stories. Nothing is oversized, filled with extra words so that you can feel like you are getting more than you paid for. You are, of course. But not in word count.

As is so often the case, the small story about a few, packs so much more punch than big numbers. This one starts before the Great Depression and takes us through that period. Not that I should be calling it a story. I groaned when I realised I’d picked up an autobiography, not a novel. Live life, don’t read about others, p-llllease. But I was too mean not to read it, serves me right for not looking carefully when I bought it. And before two pages were up I was goggle-eyed, gaping-mouthed hooked.

The man’s a genius. He can even make biography bearable. I’m not going to review this, for the simple reason that I’m not worthy too. The human suffering he writes about, what Americans did to Americans, even white Americans to white Americans, would be demeaned by anything I said about it. I don’t think I ever realised so clearly the extent to which poverty and wealth create the same barriers, the same hate as race or religion, maybe even worse. Watching the way wealthy Americans treated those they were exploiting in this period made my stomach churn. I think that’s the most incredible aspect of it. It is so easy to understand poor people might hate rich. But this book brings home the other side of this and it is truly ghastly to watch.

This is a wildy entertaining book, but it is about people who were rich, watching, exploiting and being despicable to their poor neighbours. It is about people unnecessarily half starving, living in the most desperate circumstances and heart in mouth hoping they pull through. It makes you ashamed to be human.

So I thought.

But then, I hadn’t picked up La Douleur yet.

‘Shit.’ That is what I did say out loud, irritated when I picked this up, the very next book after Roughneck. Another hasty purchase, another %$^#$ autobiography. A slightly wanky one, if it comes to that, I felt as I started it – after the plain matteroffactness of Thompson, Duras seemed on the hysterically dramatic side.

Then again, who wouldn’t be? Thompson writes about the half starved. Duras writes of the 95% starved. I don’t know how to put that. People who are literally skin and bones as they come back, those few who do, from the camps of Nazi Germany, people who are so close to death that food is going to kill them as surely as lack of it will, people whose skeletons can’t bear the tiny weight on them. I have no way of describing the horrors recorded here and to quote bits and pieces would seem plain disrespectful.

I did need some pages to adjust to the girly, introspective way Duras sets out her story here, but then, it was never supposed to be a story, not like that. It was what she wrote at the time for herself, trying to hang on to what was left of her sanity as she waited for her husband to come back during the period in which the prisoners were set free from the Nazi camps. She has some moments of marvelous acidity as she describes how some of the French take advantage of the new political situation. She is no friend of de Gaulle, who sounds like a right creep the way she tells it.

It turned out that being ashamed of America in the Depression wasn’t the half of it.

Lately I seem to keep on – completely coincidentally – reading books that pair each other in some significant way and here again, it’s happened. It’s an odd request, but I’m making it. These books go together. Get them and read them back to back. It’ll be totally worth it, I promise!

Afterthought:

I went to see de Santiago Amigorena's Another silence recently and it deals, as does Duras, with the issue of revenge. What a fine contrast. The heroine, whose husband and child are murdered, sets about revenge as coldly as does Duras in the story where she talks about torturing a collaborator, but in the end, faced with the perpetrator, a piece of Argentinian trash, she not only can't kill him, but she even grants him a gesture of mercy. The difference? Maybe that in Another Silence she meets the wife and child of the killer of her family. Maybe Duras is able to torture people with the objectivity of principle because her victim doesn't look human.

Then again, maybe it is part of her own terrible guilt. It transpires that Duras - all the time she was suffering in such a melodramatic way that she confesses 'D' chastises her and points out she should be ashamed of how she is behaving - is in love with 'D' and planning to tell her husband as soon as she can, if he comes back, that she wants a divorce. No wonder she has to behave as if she is suffering all that he is, even though she can only play at that.

I don't think this detracts from the book, it simply adds a layer of human behaviour which may repel the reader, but is no less readable for that. ( )