From Publishers Weekly
A childhood spent in colonial French Indochina, where she was born in 1914; a member of the Resistance in occupied France during WWII; a belated victory over alcoholism-Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novels and films, most famously The Lover and Hiroshima Mon Amour, certainly draw upon a life rich with incident. Yet Parisian academic Vircondelet's account is overwritten and hagiographical. He symbolizes the elemental source of Duras's work as "the Nightship," a recurrent image; elsewhere, he describes her work as "this cry springing from her, an ancient sound, echoes reverberating from all of the cries haunting her." Such passages strive for incantatory power but at times overshadow the otherwise noteworthy incidents they seek to illuminate. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is not the first biography of Duras by Vircondelet, who updated his original 1991 French version (Duras: Biographie, Lacombe, St. Laurent, Quebec; Editions Francois Bourin, Paris) for this translation. Vircondelet's attempt at Duras's "impossible biography" is really a portrait of the writer as she emerges from her works: "Duras's story, her life," he states in the preface, "is to be found...in the reflections sent back into the books by the mirrorlike facts." Nee Donnadieu in 1914, Duras spent her youth in colonial French Indochina; in France, she joined the French Resistance as well as the Communist Party. Though she is best known as the author of Hiroshima mon amour, which was filmed in collaboration with Alain Resnais, and her 1984 autobiographical novel L'Amant (The Lover), her literary production is voluminous, including novels, film scripts, and published interviews. Readers aware of the subjective nature of autobiographical works and hoping to find in this book objective, critical, and historical perspectives may need to await another biography of Duras.Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California, Los AngelesCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Duras--novelist, playwright, and screenwriter--is France's most influential and controversial living writer. Best known, perhaps, for the film Hiroshima Mon Amour and the award-winning novel The Lover, Duras has a penchant for autobiography, however cryptically or impressionistically rendered. Vircondelet, one of Duras' first serious critics and staunchest admirers, has written a purposefully literary biography that attempts to emulate Duras' lean and piercing prose. This approach is, for the most part, engagingly lyrical. In spite of some hazy patches, Vircondelet succeeds in capturing Duras' unfailingly subversive and defiant personality; recording the main events in her unusual, hectic, and productive life; and explicating the symbolism and persona she has evolved over her 50-year career. From her feral, soul-shaping Indochina childhood during the 1920s--the source of her creativity--to her harrowing years in the Resistance, involvement with the Communist Party, and knockout bouts with alcoholism, Duras has thrived on scandal, paradox, and ambiguity, all the while driven by an "ardent, absolute, frantic need to write." When Vircondelet draws aside the veil of Duras' fiction, he uncovers an author every bit as untamed, daring, alluring, and invincible as her confounding heroines. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
This biography, a welcome complement to Marguerite Duras's prolific literary career, is compromised by Vircondelet's stylistic copying of his subject's oblique technique. Vircondelet's project is made clear from an epigraph quoting Duras: ``I would like to see someone write about me the way I write. Such a book would include everything at once.'' Much of Duras's work is clearly autobiographical, frequently revisiting the events of an exotic and dynamic life. In various writings she has retold the focal events of her life, most famously of growing up in Indochina, where she took a wealthy Chinese lover at the age of 15 (inspiring The Sea Wall and The Lover). During WW II, she joined the Paris Resistance with her husband (who, in the course of their activities, would be sent to Dachau). Later she joined and fell out with the Communist Party. Vircondelet is best at chronicling the first half of Duras's life and at recounting these charged events in light of her later writings. Throughout her singular career, Duras's literary work and political activities coincided with new movements without truly belonging to them--the New Wave in film (Hiroshima Mon Amour), the nouveau roman in literature, and leftist politics from radical activities in the 1950s to the turmoil of May 1968 and the women's movement. A familiar and controversial public figure in France, Duras receives full partisan support from Vircondelet, though he gives equal time to her critics. The biographer addresses Duras's complicated relationships with her mother and brothers, and her perplexing yet intimate relationship with a much younger homosexual man. However, he always follows Duras's versions of her personal life and thus adds little original interpretation of her character. Vircondelet, who has also written biographies of Huysmans and Pascal, knows Duras's work and reads it well. But he's too close to her. His epigonic biography too often reads like pretentious ghostwriting. (37 photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Harvard Review 11-95
"Vircondelet pays . . . the ultimate tribute to his subjects incantatory vision by narrating her life in a typically Durasian manner. Composed entirely in the present tense, the biography is an example of 'fluent writing' which, according to Vircondelet, is the only appropriate means by which to communicate Duras' erratic, hermetic, yet fervently lived life. . . . There is plenty to Duras to engage us."

Michael Perkins 5-1-95
"Duras has lived a romantic, rebellious life . . . and Vircondelet's biography is dizzyingly romantic to suit his subject."

Choice 4-95
"Vircondelet, writing in the present tense with flash forwards, uses a style that is lush, poetic, vivid, elliptical."

Vogue 12-94
"Duras is a riveting read."

Marguerite Duras, Le Nouvel Observateur
"The story of your life, of my life, doesn't exist, or perhaps it's a question of semantics. The novel of my life, our lives, yes, but not the story. When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life."

Book Description
tr Thomas Buckley

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is the first full-length biography of one of the best-known and most influential French writers of our time, as celebrated for her films (Hiroshima Mon Amour) as for her novels (The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Lover). It takes Duras from colonial Indochina (where she was born in 1914) to wartime France, through the intellectual skirmishes of the 1950s and leftist movements of the 1960s, up to the present time. An autobiographical writer by nature, Duras has poured her exotic life into her books, and Vircondelet is the first to separate fact from fiction, leading us to a greater appreciation of her inimitable fiction. Although it gives a full, chronological account of Duras's life and work, Duras is not a conventional biography. "In order to give an exact account of her life, her inner workings," Vircondelet explains in his preface, "one needs to acquire and rediscover a secret, a kind of alchemy, the nature of her 'fluent writing,' as she calls it." Employing a kind of "fluent writing" himself, Vircondelet brings a rare empathy to his task, allowing him to discover secret connections between the life and work. Both a mesmerizing biography and an innovative work of literary criticism, Duras is a bold and unforgettable achievement. First published in France in 1991, the book has been updated by the author for this English translation. It is illustrated with 37 photographs.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A childhood spent in colonial French Indochina, where she was born in 1914; a member of the Resistance in occupied France during WWII; a belated victory over alcoholism-Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novels and films, most famously The Lover and Hiroshima Mon Amour, certainly draw upon a life rich with incident. Yet Parisian academic Vircondelet's account is overwritten and hagiographical. He symbolizes the elemental source of Duras's work as ``the Nightship,'' a recurrent image; elsewhere, he describes her work as ``this cry springing from her, an ancient sound, echoes reverberating from all of the cries haunting her.'' Such passages strive for incantatory power but at times overshadow the otherwise noteworthy incidents they seek to illuminate. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)

Library Journal

This is not the first biography of Duras by Vircondelet, who updated his original 1991 French version (Duras: Biographie, Lacombe, St. Laurent, Quebec; Editions Franois Bourin, Paris) for this translation. Vircondelet's attempt at Duras's "impossible biography" is really a portrait of the writer as she emerges from her works: "Duras's story, her life," he states in the preface, "is to be found...in the reflections sent back into the books by the mirrorlike facts." Ne Donnadieu in 1914, Duras spent her youth in colonial French Indochina; in France, she joined the French Resistance as well as the Communist Party. Though she is best known as the author of Hiroshima mon amour, which was filmed in collaboration with Alain Resnais, and her 1984 autobiographical novel L'Amant (The Lover), her literary production is voluminous, including novels, film scripts, and published interviews. Readers aware of the subjective nature of autobiographical works and hoping to find in this book objective, critical, and historical perspectives may need to await another biography of Duras.-Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles

BookList - Donna Seaman