The impudent ones A novel

Marguerite Duras

Book - 2021

"A major publishing event: the previously untranslated story of a family's moral reckoning and a daughter's fall from grace, from the renowned author of The Lover and The War"--

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FICTION/Duras Margueri
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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographical fiction
Published
New York : The New Press 2021.
Language
English
French
Main Author
Marguerite Duras (author)
Other Authors
Kelsey L. (Kelsey Lee) Haskett (translator)
Item Description
Originally published in France as Les Impudents by Editions Gallimard, 1992.
Physical Description
252 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781620976517
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When French writer Duras, renowned for The Lover, temporarily lost her government job during the German occupation, she completed her first novel, which was published quietly in 1943, fading so fully into obscurity that this is its first English translation. A portrait of a family at odds--a depleted second marriage, animosity among siblings and a stepsibling, money troubles, and escalating conflicts in an apartment outside Paris and a rundown Dordogne estate--it incorporates autobiographical elements and sets the thematic template for the innovative author's future works. Most notable is the psychological intensity of the central figure, mercilessly observant Maud, who boldly refuses to comply with familial or social expectations, and Duras' ravishingly descriptive passages contrasting the stifling monotony of human struggles versus the glory and freedom of nature. With affairs, suicide, rivalry, gossip, desolation, betrayal, and dysfunction, rendered with touches of Flaubert, the Brontës, and Woolf, and illuminated via invaluable essays by translator Haskett and Duras' biographer, Jean Vallier, this flawed yet intriguing novel is revealed to be the proving ground on which Duras taught herself how to cast her provocative spell.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The first novel by Duras (1914--1996), who won the Prix Goncourt for her landmark The Lover, available for the first time in English, is unfortunately a peculiarly bland work of juvenilia, a boring book about bored, bourgeois people. Duras's focus is the Grant-Taneran family, who dwell in a Parisian suburb. They are: vexed matriarch Mrs. Grant-Taneran, her retiring second husband, their son Henry, and two children from her previous marriage--coquettish Maud and "nasty," indolent spendthrift Jacques, whose fiendishness drives what action there is. Travelling to their overgrown summer estate in the country, a marriage plot develops as Maud is courted first by the bucolic farm boy John Pecresse, then the dashing hunter George Durieux. Scandal seems to follow the family wherever they go, and Jacques schemes to turn his sister's reputation as a fallen woman to his advantage, which she counters by reporting Jacques to the police for counterfeit bills. Essays by Haskett and biographer Jean Vallier are of more interest than the novel itself, situating its semiautobiographical story historically and with regard to Duras's perennial themes and future career. This lackluster novel has strictly scholarly appeal. (Mar.)

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