The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities by Marguerite Duras
One of the foremost thinkers and novelists of postwar France was Marguerite Duras, although her wartime works were not fully published until after her passing. The Wartime Notebooks follow Duras’s early life, including her traumatic childhood in Indochina and her agonizing wait for her husband’s release from Nazi incarceration, illuminating the real-life inspiration for many of her best-selling books. The Boyfriend is the most well-known of these; it is based on the author’s own life and tells the eerie story of a turbulent relationship between a teenage French girl and her affluent Chinese lover in pre-war Indochina. Duras describes the intense connection between two unforgettable exiles as well as life on the edges in the closing years of France’s colonial empire in simple, dazzling writing.
The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities by Marguerite Duras
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Practicalities is a compilation of brief, incredibly intimate writings that Duras dictated just before she passed away. These humorous, earthy, opinionated, and unexpectedly current thoughts on parenthood, domesticity, sex, love, drinking, writing, and more are deceptively straightforward.
A lover. A tale about a very young woman (actually a girl because she is just 16 years old) and her lover must have been rather audacious for its time. It’s a very French book—sophisticated, tangy, but never bitter. The Wartime Notebooks mainly contained recollections of her early years when French colonialism was drawing to an end. It is a colourful memoir laced with small facts that might or might not be entirely accurate but are undoubtedly fascinating.
The collection of short articles titled Practicalities, which covers a variety of experiences and sentiments about her life, is less engaging but still informative. The book’s construction is exquisite and fairly opulent, with creamy paper and a nice ribbon for the bookmark. Although I did find the print to be fairly small and challenging to read, this could have more to do with my aged eyes than the printing itself. You could find yourself squinting and bringing the pages close to your face if you don’t have great vision.
Overall, this is a charming collection of fiction and essays from a writer who lived throughout the Second World War the way I’ve always imagined French women to have lived.
