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“... her Goncourt Prize and sold a million copies of her most conventional novel, The Lover (1984) – Marguerite Duras was a literary monster. Her personality and the legends about her have fascinated readers of everything from Elle to the Village Voice. Laure Adler’s biography, the best so far, proves that the required period of mourning is over. ...”

“... Marguerite Duras describes a crowd in French Indo-China (in 1930): ‘The clatter of wooden clogs is ear-splitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.’ This impression is familiar to me, from National Service days in Hong Kong and the British New Territories ...”

“... To interview​ Marguerite Duras, you had to speak Duras. ‘Durassien’ stood, then and now, for inscrutability. Her novels consist of a succession of paragraphs entire of themselves; in her plots everything happens at once or nothing happens. Her movies were about giving the viewer as little to see as possible, and all the better if that meant the screen went black for up to half an hour at a time ...”

“... interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the ...”

“... is only one simple alternative: women can fuck, or they can be free. Women who think otherwise (Marguerite Duras is singled out) are guilty of ‘capitulation’. Just about the only woman praised in this book is Joan of Arc, who, Dworkin assures us, contrary to Medieval chronicles, must have actually killed some men in battle. On the ...”

“... spent a year on the best-seller list. They also suggest that it recalls the early Marguerite Duras. This I don’t quite see, although both writers are concerned with the formidable barriers of loneliness. Loneliness for Duras, however, is a personal disability which leaves her characters not ...”

“... age for publishing and reading in China. We got everything from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Marguerite Duras and Milan Kundera. Readers had been starved for more than two decades: some good books sold in their millions. García Márquez topped the list, and as a consequence influenced countless Chinese novelists – including Mo Yan, who confessed ...”

“... Maldoror’s approach over her long career is set out in Monangambeee. ‘I am black,’ she told Marguerite Duras in 1958, ‘I need to think of myself as black.’ She was also a committed anti-colonialist: monangambeee is an elongation of the Kimbundu word for ‘contract labourer’; it was one of the rallying cries of the Angolan liberation ...”

“... India in another – the descriptions of which are done by a parodist, a reader of Conrad or Marguerite Duras perhaps, not by a concerned traveller. But for as long as Echenoz remains at home, in Paris or the provinces, place stands out in his novels by its ordinariness, as a rather mucky environment, whether indoors or out, that badly needs the ...”

“... it’s recounted – a plainness and immediacy Dustan modelled on the ‘bad French’ of his hero Marguerite Duras. ‘I find [literature] old-fashioned. I find it snobbish. I find it right-wing, a prisoner to the aristocratic values on which it was founded,’ he said. What he loved about Duras was that she knew ...”

“... and intensify to the point where they start to resemble skinnings and stabbings of the self. Like Marguerite Duras in La Douleur, which she claimed was a wartime journal she found in a drawer, but had no memory of writing, Murakami lays claim to a share in others’ crimes against humanity. His character Okada becomes a kind of clairvoyant conscript, not ...”

“... prejudicial in the sense that she does not simulate incompatibilities. She reads Dostoevsky, and Marguerite Duras, and Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb – in three of the most brilliant chapters in her new book – after Freud but not for Freud. David Aberbach, by contrast, is oddly impressed by how much Great Writers in the past ...”

“... reminding how much they have contributed to its literature. Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet women, collected, Studs ...”

“... Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been directly ...”

“... writer, despite her excellent taste as a reader – she loved magical realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as a genre is more ...”