The war : a memoir
Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray (Translator)
A collection of six texts by Marguerite Duras published in 1985. Two texts are invented: L'ortie brisée:184[1] and Aurélia Paris. The remaining four texts are based on lived experience. In La Douleur, her husband becomes Robert L. and others also retain the names used as resistants. Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier, 86-131 recounts her association with the man who arrested her husband (and his name is changed to protect his wife and child). In Albert des Capitales and Ter le milicien, Duras becomes Thérèse and these are accounts of the immediate aftermath of Paris being liberated, where those who sold the Jews to the Gestapo, and those who served in the Vichy militia were tried by resistance groups. In Albert des Capitales, Thérèse (Duras) extorts a confession under torture of man who sold Jews to the Gestapo. Her colleagues show their disapproval and rather than the expected summary execution, she asks D. to let him walk away
Print Book, English, ©1986
Pantheon Books, New York, ©1986