Marguerite Duras: MD

While adapting French novelist Marguerite Duras’ (1914–1996) The Dogs of Prague for the stage, Pia Forsgren, Director of The Jewish Theatre in Stockholm, compiled an extraodinary anthology-cum-dossier on Duras. This magnificent two-volume edition consists of 40 short memoirs and portrait–essays on Duras with extensive documentation focusing on her activism for the Resistance, and for the French Communist Party as a comrade of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jeanne Moreau (volume one); and a magnificent collection of 360 color and black-and-white photographs of Duras, from a passport photo of the little French-Vietnamese girl to her son Jean Mascolo’s wonderful portrait of an aged grande dame (volume two). The book’s paper jackets mimic worn faux-leather passport bindings; one features Duras’ ‘stamped’ initials, and the other features a specially designed ‘compass portrait’ of the author, with such points of orientation as Politics, Writing, Passion, Indo-China, Alcohol, Mother, War and Eroticism. Limited stock available.