SOURCE: "Eternally Unpredictable," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4743, February 25, 1994, p. 24.

Below, Gunn reviews two of Duras' works, Le Monde Exterieur and Ecrire, as well as Christiane Blot-Labarrer's Marguerite Duras and Leslie Hill's Marguerite Duras, both biographies.

Who gets closest to Marguerite Duras? Who writes most illuminatingly of her, the author herself or her critics? All four books under review, even that entitled Le Monde extérieur, are trying to get close to Duras, though they do not agree on how best to do so. Does one get closest by becoming intimate, or rather by maintaining some distance? Christiane Blot-Labarrère tries the former approach, Leslie Hill the latter; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, their works argue respectively for Duras the destroyer of boundaries, and Duras the advocate of the impossibility of encounter. While Duras herself goes both inside, in Ecrire, which is concerned in part with her house, and...