French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Vircondelet, Marguerite Duras. Une autre enfance.
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs

Marguerite Duras. Une autre enfance.

Alain Vircondelet

Lormont: Le Bord de l'eau, coll. "Biographies", 2009.

EAN: 9782356870391

180 p.

15 Euros

Publisher's description:

Marguerite Duras's other childhood is the one she spent as a young girl far from colonial Indochina, its jungles, and bush villages, in the southwest of France.

She would return to it tirelessly, seeking to retrace the steps of a father lost too soon, joining him symbolically by adopting the name Duras, after the small town in the Lot-et-Garonne region near which Henri Donnadieu had bought a country house. Until her final days, "this little corner of the world" would both torment and enchant her, as she longed to reconnect there with her family and the emotion of a place that, as she would put it, set her "on the path to becoming something like a writer".

Alain Vircondelet's biographical study focuses on a less familiar chapter of Marguerite Duras's early life, shifting attention away from colonial Indochina to the southwest of France, near the small town of Duras in the Lot-et-Garonne region. Marguerite Duras's other childhood is the one she spent as a young girl far from colonial Indochina, its jungles, and bush villages, in the southwest of France. Readers interested in biographical approaches to modern French literature and the formative influences behind major literary voices may find this volume relevant.