The War: A Memoir

This memoir is a very heartfelt testiment to love, longing, hunger, suspicion, pain and regret. It is always a treat when a writer of Duras' caliber is witness to extraordinary events and the reader is pulled along as she desperately tries to find out information about her imprisoned husband. The fact that the episodes are presented out of order is slightly disconcerting I felt in the sense that the book becomes a collection of several periods rather than a linear narrative.

"Memoirists who reveal turbulent pasts are faulted for exhibitionism," writes Greg Lichtenberg in his essay, "Life is also Here: Toward a Manifesto of Memoir," while those with superficially quiet lives are blamed for having no story." Marguerite Duras has a profound story to tell, whether it's exhibitionism or not. Her intent, which has a much larger scope than a memoir with the structure of a simple diary, seemes to be to humanize and personalize the wartime chaos and utter dehumanization of 1940s France under Nazi domination. She sets a record about the Holocaust. She makes a monument rather than writes a diary. This is why her memoir rises above those that Lichtenberg criticizes, those that "seem a pornography of emotions, offering up whatever excess of misery will provoke a fleeting response"; what he calls, "a talk-show between book covers." The War is crafted not written. You won't find mind-numbing cliches but only imaginative language. And the language will move you.