Suspended Passion

Interviews

Marguerite Duras

Translated by Chris Turner

 

5.5 x 7.75 inches, 136 pp. May 2016

ISBN : 9780857423290

Rs  595.00 (HB)
$24.50 (HB)
£17.00 (HB)

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A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews—hailed on its French publication as Duras’s 'secret confession'—offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life and relationships.

The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the 73-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered, translated into French and has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover.

A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

Marguerite Duras (1914­–96) was a French writer and filmmaker and the author of many books, including The Lover.

 

Chris Turner is a writer and translator who lives in Birmingham, England.

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