SUSPENDED PASSION by Marguerite Duras ( 9780857423290 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

SUSPENDED PASSION
INTERVIEWS

By:

Marguerite Duras

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£18.50

Our price:

£16.65

Discount:

10% off

You save:

£1.85

ISBN 10:

0857423290

ISBN 13:

9780857423290

Availability:

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Stock:

Currently 0 available

Publisher:

SEAGULL BOOKS LONDON LTD

Pub. date:

12 August, 2016

Series:

SB-The French List

Pages:

136

Description:

In 1987 the Bolognese journalist Leopoldina Pallota della Torre met the 73-year-old Marguerite Duras at her flat in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district of Paris, after sustained efforts to persuade the author to grant her an interview. Subsequently, Duras accorded a whole series of interviews to the young Italian and the result was the publication in 1989 of La Passione sospesa, a book which strangely failed to attract the attention of French publishers at the time. Twenty-four years later, the Italian text was rediscovered, rendered into French, published by Les Editions du Seuil and received with acclaim as a major literary event. It was hailed by the critic of the Nouvel Observateur as Duras's "secret confession." In its revealing pages, Duras speaks freely on an extraordinary range of subjects: her life as a writer, the cinema, her friendship with Francois Mitterand, her well-known if rather incongruous love of television, her alcoholism, Chekhov and his 'music of silence', football (it triggers a strong sense of 'humanity'), her literary contemporaries (they 'envy' her), Jean-Paul Sartre (responsible for 'France's cultural and political backwardness'), Jacques Lacan (she couldn't make much of his writings), God (is it really possible to be a total unbeliever?) and, most significantly of all perhaps, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam and the influence of her family, with particular insights into a mother she describes as mad and pessimistic and an elder brother who seems to have been a constant figure of menace.

Synopsis:

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

Publication:

Imprint:

Seagull Books London Ltd

Returns:

Returnable

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