Me & Other Writing
MARGUERITE DURAS, TRANSLATED BY OLIVIA BAES AND EMMA RAMADAN
Reviewed by Joy Clark
It is difficult to classify this collection of the late Marguerite Duras, experimental writer and filmmaker. Within it, she covers the publicized French trials of Yves Saint Laurent, the loss of a child, the madness of parenting, and intersubjectivity. Confidently and passionately, she examines it all through the lens of her own experiences.
From her title essay, “Me” (1986), she pens, “I don’t know what non-violence is, I can’t even comprehend it. Peace with oneself, I don’t know what that is. I have only tragic dreams, of hatred or of love. But I don’t believe in dreams. I write. What moves me is myself.” Duras uses this internal struggle, here and elsewhere, to explore the external struggles in the world around her, ranging from political to historical in her scope. In her 1985 essay, “The Men of Tomorrow,” she layers and juxtaposes to show us how the quotidian impacts the eternal: “The everyday issues that arise for the individual, meaning those related to his purpose and his futility, are crucial issues for all of humanity, and they are mundane, they are the most observable, the most frequent.” The work’s translators, Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, do a wonderful job of capturing Duras’ unique, liquid prose that shimmers between fact and fiction, mystery and truth, personal and political. Me & Other Writing is both a wonderful, accessible introduction to Duras and a collage-like collection offering aficionados a fresh view at a writer who escaped genre constraints and offered literature a new realm of possibilities.