Belinda Jack

No Romance

Wartime Notebooks: and Other Texts

By

MacLehose Press 336pp £19.99 order from our bookshop

Bled dry of sentimentality and brutal, Marguerite Duras’s language affronts the reader in these Notebooks as it does in all her writing. This is often down to bald statements made vivid by reference to body fluids: ‘Catholics cannot bear blood. De Gaulle is a Catholic general, meaning that his role is to spill blood but under orders. Popular uprisings make him puke.’

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