In the essay below, Ramsay considers the autobiographical fiction genre and analyzes the language and structure of Duras' works.

In the following essay, Reid discusses the ways in which the café setting represents an “ideal inner space” in Duras's fiction.

In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Duras, Garis discusses how the author's views and life experiences have impacted her writing.

In the following essay, Rava examines the attempts of Duras's female characters to create a linguistic voice and presence for themselves in the predominantly male urban milieu.

In the following essay, Mazzola discusses the relationship between gender and familial roles in Duras's fiction.

In the following essay, Cismaru analyzes Des journées entières dans les arbres, praising Duras's realistic depiction of “the world of the dispossessed.”

In the following introduction to her book Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, Willis focuses on The Lover in her examination of Duras's “transgressive” texts.

In the following interview, Duras remarks on feminism and how the response to her work has differed in France and the United States.

In the following essay, Schuster discusses female sexuality and subjugation in “The Boa.”

The basic theme of Marguerite Duras' novels, plays, and films is the interplay between love and destruction, conflicting drives which are often resolved in the violence of a criminal act. The fascination with the crime passionnel or love murder leads Duras naturally to a reliance on the detective story, a genre where murder is central and where the dual structure of crime and investigation offers a model for parallel movements toward violence, then communion. Duras shares the affinity of the authors ...

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.

In the essay below, which is based on an interview with Duras, Riding discusses the autobiographical nature of her writing.

In the following review, Manguel considers the autobiographical nature of The North China Lover and concludes that a clear, factual biography would aid the reader in interpreting Duras' works.

Below, Danto reviews Duras' novella The Man Sitting in the Corridor and compares it to her earlier novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein.

The ostensible subject of Le Camion is a film-maker (played by Mme. Duras herself) going over the script of a film she wants to make with the other leading player…. [The] device of discussing an unmade film is only a device; it is not the real subject of the film. True enough, for much of the time we do get Duras reading lines to [Gérard] Depardieu, and the actor asking questions about the characters each would be playing (this is a film in the conditional tense). Who would she be, asks Depard...

In the following review, Thon contends that The North China Lover is less distant and more humane than the earlier novel The Lover.

[The control in Duras's] new film, Le Camion—The Truck—suggests that she has become a master. But there's a joker in her mastery: though her moods and cadences, her rhythmic phrasing, with its emotional undertow, might seem ideally suited to the medium, they don't fulfill moviegoers' expectations. Conditioned from childhood, people go to the movies wanting the basic gratification of a story acted out. Many directors have tried to alter this conditioning, breaking aw...

Marguerite Duras has pioneered what she calls the "multiple work of art," a text which is simultaneously a novel, a play, a dance, a film, an opera. Duras has broken the "rules," the long-standing codes which separated the various art forms, in order to provide a bridge from one to the other…. Duras's sense of the multiple work of art stems from her growing disillusionment with writing and reading as obsolete forms. She writes, she says, from compulsion, maintaining...

In the following review of The North China Lover, Romaine discusses how repeating essentially the same story over again in her work allows Duras to perfect the telling of this tale.

In the following review, Munn compares The North China Lover to The Lover and argues that despite their similar subject matter The North China Lover is a more personal and a better-written account.

In the following review, Grossman states that despite its unusual and sparse style, somber mood, and difficult subject matter, Summer Rain is a compelling novel.

In the following review, Josipovici claims that Practicalities is surprisingly boring and uninformative given the high quality of Duras' fiction.

As does all her fiction after 1953 (the date of Les Petits chevaux de Tarquinia, a transitional work), Madame Duras' first play [Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise] falls within the general pattern established by such writers as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, to mention only the most famous among contemporary anti-dramatists: generally plotless compositions from which motivation, that stock prop of the traditional theater, is patently absent; completely or partly anonymous characters; banalit...

India Song is a film which simultaneously represents a departure from, and a codification of, Marguerite Duras' oeuvre. The narration introduces characters who have appeared frequently in Duras' films and novels…. However, their position as protagonists is extremely tenuous. They do not develop in the traditional sense from work to work. Rather, they remain elusive, representing a constant flux of just "being". The acts they encompass pale in relationship to their reaction...

[In "India Song," Marguerite Duras's] most perfectly realized film, the present is in a constant state of deliquescence. As in her previous films, the voices function as an echo chamber whereby the past is imprinted and repeated to infinity…. The fact that it is possible to enjoy [the] characters, to come under the film's spell, and not see it as a parable about the imminent demise of the bourgeoisie is perhaps as much a function of Duras's ambivalence as the audien...

The last thing I felt like doing that Tuesday was see a film by Marguerite Duras. I'd been exhausted by festivaling all day. The rigors of The Truck were, I feared, more than I could take. By film's end, I found myself exhilarated, ready to dance, party, take the long walk home. Not that The Truck is any less rigorous than Duras's usual fare. Just that The Truck is such a joyous expression of rigor it leaves you energized, heady from the motion of the rolling beast…. For all her ...

[Woman of the Ganges] is a deliberate journey through a self-endowed world, in which cinema itself, as a means of expression, is alternately questioned, denied, and finally affirmed…. It is explanation itself which functions as the principal theme of Woman of the Ganges. The plot is ostensibly concerned with a group of people who have returned to a scene from their past. Entering into this void, they try to re-establish the relationships which had originally failed. What the film presents us with, ho...

Rather than attempting a detailed realistic evocation of a resort hotel such as those in Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad or Visconti's Death in Venice, Duras' setting is reduced to bare essentials [in Destroy, She Said]: a building with plain white interiors, a broad lawn surrounded by trees and a tennis court, no bell-boys, desk clerk or elaborate interiors or exteriors…. The building is obviously a private chateau rather than a hotel and the women wear black dresses despite the...

The most insidious thing about the nouveau movie, which is a polite way of describing Marguerite Duras's newest, most minimal film, "Nathalie Granger," is that it traps you in its own time, unlike the nouveau roman, which can be skipped through or read at leisure in an afternoon or a year. You can't skip through "Nathalie Granger." To see it you are forced to watch it for as long as it lasts, while, in turn, it watches its characters, rather as if the camera were a ...

I have slumped through India Song twice. It does not improve on closer acquaintance. To be fair to Mlle Duras, she is quotably her worst enemy: 'I make films to kill time. If I had the courage to do nothing, I'd do nothing … That's the most sincere thing I can say about my activities.' At this rare moment in time, reviewer and film-maker join hands. A more killing way with time—I talk about mine—it would be hard to conjure. Calcutta (maybe), 1937 (perhaps), a...

I'm not sure that I can reasonably explain the pleasure I take in Marguerite Duras's "Destroy, She Said," much of which I find unendurable, but an explanation on some level is worth trying…. Although "Destroy, She Said" avoids most of the vulgar conventional ties to place and character, and although it says very little once that it does not also say twice, it gives the impression finally of precision, eloquence and considerable wit.

[The purpose of this study is to reveal a] possible dimension to … Dix heures et demie du soir en été, namely that of symbolism in the relationship of the heroine, María, to the criminal, Rodrigo Paestra. On one hand, the María-Rodrigo relationship might be interpreted as a possible "incarnation" of love in order to serve as a counterpoint to the awakened passionate love between María's husband (Pierre) and her friend (Claire). Another possibili...

Like scènes à faire that should absolutely not be faites, there are inescapable questions which just should not be asked. With Détruire, Dit-Elle [Destroy, She Said], the fatal question is 'What's it all about?' It is reasonably easy to say what happens, up to a certain point…. In an extraordinary final scene [three characters] … plan a little visit, and listen to sounds and music, signalling the approach of some great, but welcome, perhaps even necess...

[Marguerite Duras's Destroy, She Said is an abomination.] Hitherto the author was content to write bad novels or bad scripts for other directors; here for the second time she combined writing and directing, and the result seems not so much bad doubled as bad cubed. Two men and two women, in weirdly posed, arbitrary groupings, make endless, arcanely opaque statements past one another. It is supposed to take place in a hotel, but it is obviously someone's country house and backyard. You never se...

Stiff as uncooked asparagus, the figures who stalk through Marguerite Duras's "Woman of the Ganges" don't have to act, since the movie is narrated in English by two invisible women with lush French accents. "Soch loff, soch dee-sire!" they repeat, as they warble away…. [It] becomes quite difficult to tell who's alive or dead in this movie. (All of the performers behave like zombies, but some are probably supposed to be ghosts.) It's also very ha...

In "The Truck," the director and novelist Marguerite Duras plays a woman whose lips curl into a joyless, knowing half-smile every time she makes mention of despair. Her film should appeal most strongly to those viewers who are similarly attuned to the romantic possibilities of gloom. However, even those who have little patience for Miss Duras's preciousness may find her work as haunting and determinedly self-possessed as it is quietly infuriating…. "The Truck" is fu...

Because Miss Duras writes so elliptically, there is no special sense that she has padded [the original play of "La Musica"] until the confrontation in the hotel lobby. At that point, however, one realizes that all that has gone before has been rather superior but ultimately superfluous vamping…. (p. 215) "La Musica" is intellectually chic moviemaking of the sort that is quite entertaining while it is going on but practically ceases to exist, even as a memory, when it...