Marguerite Duras

The Suspended Passion Marguerite Duras

In 1987 the Bolognese journalist Leopoldina Pallota della Torre met the 73-year-old Marguerite Duras at her flat in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district of Paris, after sustained efforts to persuade the author to grant her an interview. Subsequently, Duras accorded a whole series of interviews to the young Italian and the result was the publication in 1989 of La Passione sospesa, a book which strangely failed to attract the attention of French publishers at the time. Twenty-four years later, the Italian text was rediscovered, rendered into French, published by Les Editions du Seuil and received with acclaim as a major literary event. It was hailed by the critic of the Nouvel Observateur as Duras's "secret confession." In its revealing pages, Duras speaks freely on an extraordinary range of subjects: her life as a writer, the cinema, her friendship with Francois Mitterand, her well-known if rather incongruous love of television, her alcoholism, Chekhov and his 'music of silence', football (it triggers a strong sense of 'humanity'), her literary contemporaries (they 'envy' her), Jean-Paul Sartre (responsible for 'France's cultural and political backwardness'), Jacques Lacan (she couldn't make much of his writings), God (is it really possible to be a total unbeliever?) and, most significantly of all perhaps, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam and the influence of her family, with particular insights into a mother she describes as mad and pessimistic and an elder brother who seems to have been a constant figure of menace.