The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Writing by Marguerite Duras
Robert Buckeye

Marguerite Duras. Writing. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lumen Editions, 1998. 78 pp. Paper: $14.95.

“My books come from this house,” Marguerite Duras writes in the title essay of this her last book. “From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.” If this essay tells us what a lifetime of writing has taught Duras about what it is possible to say, the brief memoir in the book, “Death of the Young British Pilot,” returns us to its genesis and we see how everything was there from the beginning. “I know it isn’t a story,” she writes of the pilot. “It’s a brutal, isolated fact, without reverberation.” The memoir is an account of a twenty-year-old British pilot whose plane has been shot down over Duras’s town during the Second World War and who is killed by the Germans. Several years after the war an older Englishman visits the town to find out what has happened to the pilot, and it is from him that the town learns his name and age. As the Englishman visits the grave year after year, the town learns, as Duras makes clear, something about love, and Duras writes of the pilot to remember her own love for her younger brother who died during the same war half a world away and whose body was shoveled into a mass pit. In her account half a century later, we find everything that was ever to interest Duras: some early trauma that would mark a lifetime; loss never resolved; love almost always inextricable from loss; memories one would never forget. We also see, briefly, in this memoir of the pilot and extensively in the title essay, how Duras writes. To make of anything, story, literature, fiction, call it what you will, is to compromise the experience she writes about. All her writing draws our attention to what cannot be said: her words evoke silence, her sentences isolate the space between. Once the writer ceases to doubt everything she has written she ceases to be a writer. “There are often narratives,” Duras writes, “but very seldom writing.” Only if one is alone facing the empty page that words can never fill can one make sense of the persistence of memory, the inevitability of loss, the tenacity of love. [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Writing by Marguerite Duras Robert Buckeye Marguerite Duras. Writing. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lumen Editions, 1998. 78 pp. Paper: $14.95. “My books come from this house,” Marguerite Duras writes in the title essay of this her last book. “From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.” If this essay tells us what a lifetime of writing has taught Duras about what it is possible to say, the brief memoir in the book, “Death of the Young British Pilot,” returns us to its genesis and we see how everything was there from the beginning. “I know it isn’t a story,” she writes of the pilot. “It’s a brutal, isolated fact, without reverberation.” The memoir is an account of a twenty-year-old British pilot whose plane has been shot down over Duras’s town during the Second World War and who is killed by the Germans. Several years after the war an older Englishman visits the town to find out what has happened to the pilot, and it is from him that the town learns his name and age. As the Englishman visits the grave year after year, the town learns, as Duras makes clear, something about love, and Duras writes of the pilot to remember her own love for her younger brother who died during the same war half a world away and whose body was shoveled into a mass pit. In her account half a century later, we find everything that was ever to interest Duras: some early trauma that would mark a lifetime; loss never resolved; love almost always inextricable from loss; memories one would never forget. We also see, briefly, in this memoir of the pilot and extensively in the title essay, how Duras writes. To make of anything, story, literature, fiction, call it what you will, is to compromise the experience she writes about. All her writing draws our attention to what cannot be said: her words evoke silence, her sentences isolate the space between. Once the writer ceases to doubt everything she has written she ceases to be a writer. “There are often narratives,” Duras writes, “but very seldom writing.” Only if one is alone facing the empty page that words can never fill can one make sense of the persistence of memory, the inevitability of loss, the tenacity of love. [Robert Buckeye]

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