Recommended! Alain Vircondelet's biography of the enigmatic Marguerite Duras will satisfy fans of her literature while leaving them with another mystery to solve: her life. Those seeking a fact-filled chronology of her life will be disappointed. Vircondolet does not write a traditional biography. In a way, this is refreshing; we do not need to yawn over endless dates or read lengthy, dry histories of her family members. Yet, at the same time, we miss this. Anyone who has read Duras wants to know MORE of her. Beginning Vircondelet's biography is exciting at first as the keys to Duras' life and personality seem about to be revealed. Upon reading on, it is discovered that there is little to be revealed here other than what we already know from reading her literature into which, of course, she has wound her life. Duras once told a French magazine that she wanted someone to write about her in the style of her own writing. The astonishing part of this biography is that Vircondolet has succeeded in doing this, sounding very much like Marguerite Duras. His sentences roll like waves as hers do, and the reader is lost in a blend of visions, sensuality, and philosophy. DURAS would be a five-star book if the author had managed to ferret out some unknown facts about this amazing writer. But he played his writing on the safe side, and it is not possible to rank this book higher than a four on the rating scale. But Duras' fans should definitely read the biography as it is a bit like having Duras alive again.

"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.

Two of my closest, most intellectual/cultural-elite type friends have raved about Marguerite Duras. So I read "The Lover." Great story. Okay...they tell me "Moderato Cantabile" is her masterpiece. I search for an English translation, find this foursome. Terrific, I think, I can explore even more. I must ask the reviewers of this work...Have you read it all together???? Every story is the same, folks! This woman had one, maybe two stories (okay, Hiroshima Mon Amour makes three) in her blood. Take an alcoholic woman with a hidden sexual agenda, throw in an unfaithful (substitute uptight/unattentive, etc) husband...or father (oh yeah, don't forget the incest angle), then place them all in some tedious, drawn-out situation (aftermath of a murder investigation, waiting for a construction contracter, a storm, an afternoon on a park bench), then let them TALK. And talk. And talk. Get it? I may not be the super intellectual, cultural elite type, but I know pretension when I read it. Skip Duras. Or...better...read "The Lover," pretend you know all about her, and watch the others at a party try to impress you.

"10:30 on a Summer Night" is by far the best of the four novels in this book, focusing on murder and infidelity during a vacation outside Madrid. "Moderato Cantible" is good but not as intriguing as "10:30 on a Summer Night" and is about an alcoholic mother developing an odd relationship with a stranger in a café on the way home from her son's piano lesson. "The Square" has some good lines but is generally slow, focusing solely on a salesman and a servant talking in the park.

The first story ("The Square")is a bit tedious (or maybe the significance was over my head). It's composed almost entirely of dialogue between two strangers who meet in a park and discuss their rather pitiful lives. But the three final stories are truly beautiful. The language is so vivid that even reading the stories on a cold Minnesota night I felt the urge to mop sweat from my brow. The third story, "10:30 on a Summer Night," in which a woman watches the sexual attraction develop between her husband and best friend, is incredibly poignant.

I thought that "The Malady of Death" was better that "Blue Eyes, Black Hair" in that it was shorter and more to the point, but if you want to read a more in-depth look at the same basic story line, then "Blue Eyes, Black Hair" brings insight into yet another atypical Duras romance even though it tends to drag on. If you like Duras, but want a book that flows easier, I recommend "10:30 on a Summer Night."

Although Marguerite Duras is one of my favorite writers, I don't recommend buying this book... anywhere. It is so short you can read the entire book in a bookstore and save yourself some money! When I purchased this book, I was hoping to read a novel but was disappointed to find that it is nothing short of a really long poem dragged out in size 16 font over 60 pages of reading. Which I read in about 15-20 minutes. Although I found the story quite intriguing it was not what I'd hoped for; it lacked the type of stream of consciousness writing Marguerite Duras is known for which is autobiographical in nature and very real. The malady of death is a poem. So if you are looking for a novel to read, this is not it. I recommend, "The Lover" it is by far her best work.

This is a book for those that want to understand the pain of the human soul. It tells a story of a person that had died inside, but still continues to exist in the world of the living. He desperately tries to love in order to live again, but fails, because he is ill. His illness has a name, it is called - "The Malady of Death". I assure you, this is not just another french book. This book is written by Marguerite Duras. If you have ever read anything of hers, you would know what I mean. She writes with thoughts instead of sentences, and that alone captivates reader's imagination. This particular creation will inevitably leave a trace in your memory, because her work is not only unforgetable, it is at times disturbing. She knows the other, unknown side to the human soul, and she carries her message across skillfully. If you are one of the people that questions and desires to understand - this is a book for you. Every word has it's place, every sentence has it's mission. Indulge.

I read for some time waiting for it to be interesting. No such luck.

Lol Stein was nineteen years old when her fiance, Michael Richardson, abandoned her. The moment lives starkly in Lol's memory, even after she's been married for ten years, after she's had three children, after she should have moved on with her life. The memory endures until it can be revised, until Lol can make a new memory to replace it.

Tatiana Karl, Lol's best friend in childhood, was with Lol the night her fiance left her. He did it publicly, at a prominent dance in the Town Beach casino, while Lol and Tatiana watched. Lol collapses in a state of depression, becomes uncommunicative, changes. She is brought back to South Tahla, the place of her birth, to recover. It is here that she meets John Bedford, marries him and seemingly moves on with her life, literally leaving South Tahla, as well, for ten years and breaking off all contact with old friends, including Tatiana. But the memory lingers, darkly, and can only be erased when Lol and her husband return to South Tahla, return to the place where the memory was made.

Lol works at erasing the mental trauma of her past with a new memory, a memory wrought from obsession, voyeurism, and calculated seduction. She resumes her relationship with Tatiana, now married, and makes a new relationship with Tatiana's lover. Haunting and erotically charged, marked by a disturbing psychological aridity, and written in a complex, non-linear style marked by the shifting viewpoint of its narrator, "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" is another example of why Marguerite Duras deserves to be ranked as one of the finest writers of Twentieth century literature.

Lol Stein was nineteen years old when her fiance, Michael Richardson, abandoned her. The moment lives starkly in Lol's memory, even after she's been married for ten years, after she's had three children, after she should have moved on with her life. The memory endures until it can be revised, until Lol can make a new memory to replace it.

Tatiana Karl, Lol's best friend in childhood, was with Lol the night her fiance left her. He did it publicly, at a prominent dance in the Town Beach casino, while Lol and Tatiana watched. Lol collapses in a state of depression, becomes uncommunicative, changes. She is brought back to South Tahla, the place of her birth, to recover. It is here that she meets John Bedford, marries him and seemingly moves on with her life, literally leaving South Tahla, as well, for ten years and breaking off all contact with old friends, including Tatiana. But the memory lingers, darkly, and can only be erased when Lol and her husband return to South Tahla, return to the place where the memory was made.

Lol works at erasing the mental trauma of her past with a new memory, a memory wrought from obsession, voyeurism, and calculated seduction. She resumes her relationship with Tatiana, now married, and makes a new relationship with Tatiana's lover. Haunting and erotically charged, marked by a disturbing psychological aridity, and written in a complex, non-linear style marked by the shifting viewpoint of its narrator, "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" is another example of why Marguerite Duras deserves to be ranked as one of the finest writers of Twentieth century literature.

The only reason I finished reading this book was because I'd not read any about Duras.

The writing is so stunningly bad that I had to control my anger as I read (melodramtic repetitions, little fragments that figure in soap opera, so on) because I was still curious about Duras and thought I might learn something. The translation is as awful as the text. (I'll save you examples.)

This is not a biography. It's a badly written travelogue of a literary and political career. Duras constructed an amazing life and I look forward to a biography that might open that up.

This piece of dribble is worthless.

Laure Adler has written a biography of Ms. Duras that is both compelling and confounding, and although I appreciated her considerable efforts, I finished the book probably "knowing" less about Duras than when I started.

No doubt this can be somewhat attributed to the contradictions that appear to have been a staple of Duras's life and conscience. If Ms. Adler is to be believed, Duras was the most conflicted and Protean artist of the 20th century, forever shape-shifting and believing opposites at once. For every bit of evidence Ms. Adler offers about Duras being X, she offers (at least) a Y and Z stating almost the exact opposite proposition. So I constantly found myself asking, Was she X, Y, or Z?

If she was indeed all three, then I would like the biographer to step in and make some comment to sum up the disparate parts. Rarely, if ever, does Ms. Adler see this as her function. She faithfully details the facts of Duras's life and works, but she (almost) never comments or crystallizes them. We are told on the dust jacket that Ms. Adler has been trained as an historian and as a journalist, and it is decidedly the latter profession that seems to dominate her scrutinization of Duras. Plenty of facts are offered. There is plenty of thesis and antithesis depicted, but we never seem to attain any synthesis, leaving us in the world of reportage rather than biography.

Adler does triumph in her depiction of postwar Paris in the forties and fifties. Here, she is fully in historical mode and offers readers fascinating insight into the personalities and politics of the time. Rarely have I seen such an enlightened discussion of the artistic and political Zeitgeist of that particular era. The cast of characters and their interactions are well defined and amusingly recounted. If only the remainder of the book had been so incisive.

As a feminist--or at least I would suppose she is, given that she has written a number of histories of women--Ms. Adler should be chided for her somewhat myopic concentration on Duras. One criticism that feminists constantly leveled against male biographers in the 70s and 80s was that they only chose other males as their subjects and, once chosen, only unearthed their connections to other males--and their power games, professional lifes, etc., thereby giving short shrift to personal relationships with wifes, lovers, families, etc. Here Adler discusses at length Duras's relationship with her mother, which was indeed a pivotal one, as borne out in her books and films. However, Adler fails to adequately explain the motivations or even the emotions of the males around Duras. Considering that Duras started a long-term affair with another man (Mascolo) while her husband (Anthelme) was in a concentration camp, and then kept the affair going for years afterward while the men became best of friends, we learn startingly little about how these men felt about this fact or how they accommodated it into their lives. Later on, Ms. Adler talks of Duras's relationship with her son, but this discussion is mainly held to one chapter that investigates their lives while her son was a boy. We rarely learn how the two got along as adults, which strikes me as an omission, given that it must be of some interest how the son of a major artist would respond to a mother who was so adored and reviled in her own lifetime--and who must have been difficult to live with, as an artist, an alcoholic, and a woman who self-defined around the substantial number of men who occupied important places in her sexual and intellectual lives.

In sum, I enjoyed the book and think that Ms. Adler has done some very impressive work. At the same time, given the access she received to personal materials from major players in Duras's life--including her husbands--she could have done so much more if she had expanded her vision and chose to move beyond mere journalism. If you want to know various facts of Duras's life, you may well enjoy this biography. If you want to walk away from the book with a definitive sense of who Duras was--if you want to draw back the curatin and let some new light in--perhaps you should go elsewhere. Duras, we find in this biography, was a woman of many parts. Unfortunately, Ms. Adler does not give us an adequate picture of what she was as a whole. In the end, extensive reading of Duras's work may provide a better sense of who she was, despite all her trickery and deceit, than this biography could hope to accomplish.

Laure Adler's book comes close, but no book will ever come close enough. Duras' fans will undoubtedly read anything written about her, so anxious are they for shimmers of truth regarding the woman who left such a perplexing legacy of literature. Adler's biography of the fascinating French writer is good and it is certainly much more revealing than say, Alain Vircondolet's DURAS which might be more of a pleasure to read (he took Duras up on a challenge to try and write as she did), but says far less about the woman.

There are times when Adler's sentence structure seems choppy, and this may be hard for more sophisticated readers, but bear in mind that although Anne-Marie Glasheen seems to have made a suitable translation, translations can be difficult and something is almost always lost.

The emphasis here should really be on content and Adler did a fair job considering the difficulty in separating the real Duras from the invented one. For those looking merely for facts, Adler clears up the myth around THE LOVER, does a superb job of showing Duras through the war years, and gives a reasonable look at her friendship with Mitterand. One will miss an in-depth report on her relations with her family and will undoubtedly want to know more - especially about the elusive younger brother. As we read we become struck by the presence of men in Duras' life, and we yearn a bit for insights from a close woman friend. Unfortunately, Duras did not seem to allow many women into her life.

Adler's book is recommended for any fan of Duras' literature as it will at least give some insight - possibly new - into her working mind. But don't expect miracles. And expect more books forthcoming. Duras' son, Outa, is a rather silent voice in this book and one can't help but think that there is part of Marguerite alive in the world who has not yet spoken (written) his thoughts.

A morbid attraction to the dying words of a great writer that fails greatly here. Occasionaly there are glimpses of her past greatness but most of the book is full of nonsense such as like: "I've never been pretentious.", "Both of us are innocents" (Refering to her 29 year old lover and her in her 80's (?)), "I don't know how to add. All I know how to do is create."

This very short work is followed by an essay that has some insight but mostly it's serious prose that sounds weighter than it really is. It is written by Christiane Blot-Labarrere who is (according to the book) "among the very few whose writtings were respected by Duras."

This is the type of book many creative writting students are writting and it is an example of why many intellgent readers do not read "serious books." Pick up the Lover instead to see this woaman's greatness.

This book's greatest values are (a) a look into the mind of a great author approaching death and (b) an interesting writing style ... Duras with a touch of Jabes! Duras approaches death with an honest mix of human emotions - sometimes very attached to Yann, sometimes reconciled to death as the ultimate letting go of Yann; sometimes proud and nearly pretentious regarding her writings, sometimes humbly expecting to be soon forgotten. Unlike some authors writing in similiar straits, Duras feels no need to pretend that age has made her wise. Rather she reflects as if age has only made her experienced.

If you've not read Duras and have no particular interest in human reaction to impending death, read several Duras books before reading No More but at some point read No More - it is time well spent.

Marguerite's last book. A conversation with her last lover, Yann Andrea, about herself, her love of him, her "I-got-used-to-it" genius and the feeling that the end is coming. Very impressive, but only for radical "durasians"

I'd have to agree with the synopsis, I couldn't help feeling that if I was heavily into the bottle I might find the fable that fills too much of this book more interesting. Too much time is spent whilst reading wishing that Duras would concentrate on other things, her relationship with Yann for starters instead of skirting the issue. If she didn't want it to be personal why write it?

Yann Andrea Steiner is a difficult read but rewarding. Some of the images she presents are very beautiful. The blanks in her writing and especially in this novel creates a grey, dreamlike atmosphere. This book should be read on a rainy winter afternoon.