Marguerite Duras

born April 4, 1914, Gia Dinh, Cochinchina [Vietnam]
died March 3, 1996, Paris, France

French novelist, screenwriter, scenarist, playwright, and film director, internationally known for her screenplays of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and India Song (1975). The novel L’Amant (1984; The Lover; film, 1992) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984.

Duras spent most of her childhood in Indochina, but at the age of 17 she moved to France to study at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, from which she received licences in law and politics. She favoured leftist causes and for 10 years was a member of the Communist Party. She began writing in 1942. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950; The Sea Wall), her third published novel and first success, dealt semiautobiographically with a poor French family in Indochina. Her next successes, Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952; The Sailor from Gibraltar) and Moderato cantabile (1958), were more lyrical and complex and more given to dialogue.

This splendid instinct for dialogue led Duras to produce the original screenplay for Alain Resnais’s critically acclaimed film Hiroshima mon amour, about a brief love affair in postwar Hiroshima between a Japanese businessman and a French actress. She directed as well as wrote the 1975 film adaptation of her play India Song, which offers a static, moody portrayal of the wife of the French ambassador in Calcutta and her several lovers. Some of her screenplays were adaptations of her own novels and short stories.

Duras turned regularly to a more abstract and synthetic mode, with fewer characters, less plot and narrative, and fewer of the other elements of traditional fiction; her name was even associated with the nouveau roman (“new novel”) movement, though she denied such a connection. The semiautobiographical story of L’Amant, about a French teenage girl’s love affair with a Chinese man 12 years her senior, was revised in the novel L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China Lover). Among her other novels were L’Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas (1962; The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas), Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964; The Ravishing of Lol Stein), Détruire, dit-elle (1969; Destroy, She Said), L’Amour (1971; “Love”), L’Été 80 (1980; “Summer 80”), and La Pluie d’été (1990; Summer Rain). Collections of her plays were included in Théâtre I (1965), Théâtre II (1968), and Théâtre III (1984).