Marguerite Duras, Literary Legend: Sea, Sex, Ennui

I discovered the joys of reading Marguerite Duras after I began working for John Calder at Riverrun Press in New York. It was a fabulous fringe benefit indeed.
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THE SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Open Letter Books
$12.95 trade paper, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young man on holiday in Italy walks out on his mistress and meets Anna - a beautiful, enigmatic woman who lives on a great white yacht. Anna is rich, and her life is entirely occupied with searching for her lover, the sailor from Gibraltar. She takes on the young man temporarily as her lover, and recounts to him the story of the sailor. The young man accompanies Anna on her search - a journey which takes them to France and Africa - even into the heart of the jungle. Slowly, love grows between them, and the sailor becomes not an impediment but an excuse which allows their love to flourish. Yet they exist in a state of suspension - for the sailor may always turn up to claim Anna.

My Review: A lush, louche, languid read about a woman who can't be bothered to make up her mind what to do with all the world's goods. A rich American, a bored French dude, a yacht, and Africa. It went straight to my head like any cocktail with too many ingredients will. The hangover was Calder's lack of desire to reprint and sell it...I wanted to tell people about how cool it was.

Give it to your COVID-addled college-age nephew to scratch the itch for adventure safely and vicariously.

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THE LITTLE HORSES OF TARQUINIA
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Ann Lenore Derrickson)
Out of print
$14.00 and up

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “There are no vacations from love….”

In this careful translation from the French novel by Marguerite Duras, five Parisians spend an interminable three days of their vacations at a dreary Italian beach resort. There is nothing to do but talk, drink bitter Camparis, and contemplate (or perhaps consummate) a love affair or two. As the days wear on, they imperceptibly change some of their beliefs, from “For some time I have not liked the idea of changing the world at all costs” to “But certainly it is necessary to change the world,” concluding with “There are no vacations from love….Love, it is necessary to live it completely with its boredom and everything; there are no vacations from that.”

My Review: Not for the young. It is brutally frank and unspeakably cruel. It possesses itself of, in, a kind of soporific addictive ennui that someone who has never been in love with an other for a long time can dare to conjure, still less enact.

This is the burden of the book's refrain:

“There are no vacations from love,” he said. “That does not exist. Love, it is necessary to live it completely with its boredom and everything; there are no vacations possible for that.”
He was speaking without looking at her, facing the river.
“And that is love. To distract yourself from it, one cannot. Like life, with its beauty, its shit and its boredom.”

If that frightens you, read it; if it confuses you, don't.

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THE MALADY OF DEATH
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Grove Press
$16.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a “she,” a warm, moist body with a beating heart—the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn to love. It isn’t a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to try . . .

This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, “perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe,” and its absence, “the malady of death.”

My Review: Women are the bitterest, cruelest, most reductive misogynists known to Humankind.

You say she mustn't speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and to your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they're exhausted and let the men come to them while they're asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape molding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God's. And also so that little by little, as day dawns, you may be less afraid of not knowing where to put your body or at what emptiness to aim your love.

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BLUE EYES, BLACK HAIR
MARGUERITE DURAS (tr. Barbara Bray)
Out of print
various prices

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Emotionally charged, sparsely written, and vicariously compelling, Marguerite Duras's novel centers on the desire of a young man for another man he has only glimpsed once, but with whom he falls desperately in love.

My Review: To be honest, it felt to me like this was a book whose existence was not to entertain others but to codify and clarify Duras's sense of women's interchangability to men. Men LOVE and with a weird intensity in all Duras's stories of whatever stripe. But the objects of their love, their obsessive needy desperate addiction, can...shift.

All the way to gay, in this book. But what does he do, our impassioned and exquisitely aesthetic lover? He seeks and finds a woman who looks like His Man and talks about it to her.

Very, very French. And it's in a squalid, down-at-heel seaside resort. Very, very Duras.

I believe this could very easily be the most profound idea Duras ever uttered in her novels:

She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

COVE, beginning my 2021 reviews on a Cynan-Jones-caused 5-star high

COVE
CYNAN JONES
Catapult
$19.95 hardcover, available now

I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. This is my 2021 Six-Stars-of-Five read.

Rating: 5* 6 stars of five

The Publisher Says: Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return.

THIS WAS A YULE GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. THANK YOU, MY LOVE.

My Review: Don't ever, ever think you're in a dark place again, is the primary message of this novella-cum-prose poem.

He is holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. The sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.

He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.

The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.

He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.

Our nameless point-of-view man is busy preparing to take his kayak out of the cove near his home. With his experienced preparations, catching a fish for his supper and with the material goods he needs to make the short trip comfortable, there is a heaviness. The foreboding the above passage evokes in me is matched by the fact that he's there to scatter his father's ashes. But the world doesn't have time to mourn for anyone:

There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.

These passages make me think I live in Author Cynan's head. I see and hear them in realtime. I am deeply unsettled...what is coming must be difficult because these quotidian sensations are so powerful. The ashes, the small moments of daily reality going on despite the huge gaping hole of his father's death...going out of the shelter of this homely cove, noticing its real-world comforts...
...
...
...I've read your books before, Author Cynan, something terrible this way comes.

A moment truly as before-and-after as it is portrayed to be: A lightning strike.

While alone at sea. In a kayak. With a few hours' trip supplies.

Waking up alive, though after how long he doesn't know and with the arm that conducted the current dead (the fern-like pattern of Lichtenberg figures disfiguring his now-useless hand and arm), he inventories his few supplies and begins preparations to survive. It is grueling to read and almost reeks of experience, which I hope is second-hand:

He takes off the buoyancy aid & pulls on the thick sweater, useless arm first. The smell of the sweater triggers something, but it is like a piano key hitting strings that are gone.

That image is both terrifying to me, and gorgeous to read. What a superbly wrought way to describe the sensation of losing a piece of yourself, your experience. Where one expects resonant musical pleasure, there is the presence of silence and not just the absence of sound.

There is a miserable fight, with the good luck of an itchy sunfish rubbing against his kayak and beneficently steering it towards land; there is a moment of aesthetic joy as night luminescent seas trace the presence of his hand; there is so much work and so much pain:

If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as an absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend.

That's effective self-talk for a man who's been through some huge change. "They" are the woman pregnant with his child, and the unborn person itself. For, as the sea's many thefts (water, skin) bite ever deeper, he needs this goal to focus on, and needs also his dead father's ghost in his own head reminding him how to do this, how to survive.

An image of fatherhood that I am so unspeakably glad to see in fiction, littered as it is with cheating lying beating abusing men.

The ordeal continues. The night and the day and then there is land...land within sight...with lights...and he MacGyvers up a sail to speed his bonny boat...
...
...into a squall.

All of his life he's had a recurring dream: the car leaves the road. It is never the impact that terrifies him, wakes him. His fear comes the moment he feels the car go.

His life does not pass before his eyes. There is even a point he feels calm. But then he sees the faces of the people he loves. He sees their faces as they see him go.

Here is a man driven to Be There, never to leave, always support and defend, finally driven to his uttermost extreme in search of survival.

And that is where we end.

I close my remarks by noting that this is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not.