Book Review: "Wartime Notebooks" by Marguerite Duras (Pt.2)

I'm guessing you're here because you read yesterday's instalment (part 1) entitled: The Lover. You don't need to read that one to understand this one because they are two different texts contained within the same book, but if you want to read any works of Marguerite Duras, then I would say The Lover is a great place to start. Wartime Notebooks is more fragmented and, I have to hand it to Everyman, is organised correctly within the edition of the book I have. Putting Wartime Notebooks second allows us to see the influence of her real-life situations over her greatest work only after reading the great text first.

For those of you who want to know a bit of background to the Wartime Notebooks, they were actually discovered after the death of their author. Posthumously, these were published after being found in a cupboard in her home. The four notebooks, now famous in their own rights, contain deep, profound and intimate looks and observations on life. It sort of makes you believe that perhaps Marguerite Duras was born to be a writer as she was always making such poetic and brilliantly written observations. It seemed to almost come naturally to her and as we read the notebooks, I think we realise that this woman was someone very special to the literary world. It wasn't just her writing style which seemed to be natural, but it was also the fact that she could see deep into the souls of others like some sort of literary clairvoyant or soothsayer. Their pasts, presents and futures reflected on them and staring back at her. I hope I'm making sense.

The pink notebook contained the notes that if you're interested in her work The Lover, you need to pay attention to since these were taken about French Indochina and her time there. You'll find plenty that influenced her work on the text but also you'll find stuff that was systematically left out. For example: we know that The Lover is a romantic version of events in which we get lost in the social commentary, the romanticised language and for some reason, ignore that the man is technically a pedophile. But, in the Wartime Notebooks, we see a far less romanticised version of events. It's harsh and the social commentary is no longer commentary, it is real. It's a bit more brutal and shows us the reality of the situation for someone so young like our main character. If there was any way for someone to write another novel, like the realistic version of The Lover, using the novel itself as a base but the notebooks as language guidance then I would really like to read that. It would be like an alternative version of the same book.

Duras also details her life in Nazi occupied Paris and some of the political stuff about the French Resistance movement. Nazis are dangerous figures yes, but the landscape of Paris is a bleak one too. It's like she's walked right into Dante's Inferno where she should abandon all hope. There's fear on the streets, there's not enough money to go around and yes, there are shortages of basic necessities like food and water. The bleak atmosphere under German rule and the fear instilled by the Nazis are something that Duras captures first hand and I cannot even begin to imagine the kind of evil those people were. I personally cannot imagine being in the presence of a Nazi officer even to the point I actually feel sorry for other German people of the time. If you want to know the ways in which the Nazis collapsed the French economy then this one is for you.

All in all, Duras takes us through all of the lows, and lowers of the war. There really wasn't anything good about living through it and when we really think about this fragmented work we realise that there must be hundreds of these out there - some of them still waiting to be discovered. I also think about whether Marguerite Duras ever wanted these made public - maybe she didn't. But the way they are written gives us insight into the fact that she was born to be a writer.

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