Belinda Jack
No Romance
Wartime Notebooks: and Other Texts
By Marguerite Duras, Edited by Sophie Bogaert and Olivier Corpet, (Translated by Linda Coverdale)
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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