"Not for a second do I see the need to be brave. Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice."

I just realized that I have not reviewed this book yet.

Part of the reason for my lapse is that there is never anything to say about war. About the Holocaust. About torture. About death.

Or rather, there is too much to say that I never know where to begin.

Besides Marguerite said it all already in this book.

Which is in itself impressive. She says it all in here without falling into the typical trappings of saying it all about such a subject.

Without sentimentality. In fact with the opposite of sentimentality.

"There's no point in killing him. And there's no longer any point in letting him live. ... And just because there's no point in killing him, we can go ahead and do it."

She goes to the very edge of emotional experience and is somehow able to write about it almost as it was going on, and it doesn't turn out like an overly emotional teenager's drivel (I just realized after I wrote this that it may be read as a subtle criticism of Anne Frank, but it's not intended that way, I haven't read her since high school, so can't speak on that front).

Part of the reason this is impressive is that to go to the very edge of emotional experience is an entirely different beast than to write out that experience on paper. To affect a reader in that way requires going to a different place inside of oneself after much silence, quite separate from the edge of experience that is experienced while in the midst of experiencing the edge of experience.

Duras was able to do that seemingly in the moment. At the edge and not at the edge at the same time. How?

Maybe the war divides us, divides our experience, so that we can talk about the missing cheese in the same sentence as we talk about the death of a traitor (as they do in one of the later chapters here).

Death and cheese, Duras understood, normally existed on different planes of human experience. But in wartime there is only one plane of human experience. Human experience becomes one dimensional. There are no hierarchies of objects. Everything is simultaneous.

"I feel a slight regret at having failed to die while still living."

Ho aperto questo libro come apro tutti quelli di questa autrice : senza voler sapere di cosa parlerà, senza anticipazioni sulla trama; solo immergendomi nella lettura, rapita dall'intensità che so già pronta ad avvilupparmi, dalla commozione che so già pronta ad assalirmi. E anche questa volta non rimango delusa, non vengo tradita. Bevo le parole e le immagini tutto d'un fiato. Grazie piccola Marguerite, che come sempre non hai avuto timore di raccontarti, di aprirti al giudizio del mondo, di permettere che il tuo cuore fosse scrutato da occhi stranieri. Grazie piccola Marguerite, perché ancora una volta ti sei fatta amare.

alors j'ai adoré son texte sur l'attente et j'hésitais à le mettre dans mes coups de coeur, mais j'ai vu qu'il y avait pas mal de controverses quant à l'authenticité de ce récit (elle aurait emprunté par moment les histoires d'autres personnes et Robert Anthelme l'aurait accusé d'avoir en parti travesti la réalité). Je sais pas vrm ce qui est vrai de ce qui est faux donc ça gâche un peu ma première impression du texte même s'il reste particulièrement émouvant (si jms vous avez plus d'infos, je suis preneuse).