Jean Vallier. C'etait Marguerite Duras, 1914-1945.(Book review)

Biography, March, 2007 by Hanania, Cecile

Jean Vallier. C'etait Marguerite Duras, 1914-1945. Paris: Fayard, 2006. 703 pp. ISBN 2-2136-2884-X, Euro27.

This new biography was published in May 2006 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Marguerite Duras's death. It was preceded by an album, entitled Marguerite Duras, la vie comme un roman, compiled by the same author and retracing the main steps of Duras's life through photographic documentation of her familiar settings, parents, friends, and acquaintances. After Alain Vircondelet's Duras, biographie and Christiane Blot-Labarrere's Marguerite Duras, writing a biography of Duras seems to have been an exercise avoided by Durassian scholars. Duras specialists, nurtured by the anti-positivism of French criticism since Roland Barthes, which...