Biography

Hanania, Cécile.
C'était Marguerite Duras, 1914-1945 (review)
Biography - Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 238-240

University of Hawai'i Press

Cécile Hanania - C'était Marguerite Duras, 1914-1945 (review) - Biography 30:2 Biography 30.2 (2007) 238-240 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Cécile Hanania Jean Vallier. C'était 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-Labarrère'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 dissociates literary production from the "author's" existence, are overly cautious...