What colleagues, journalists and critics write about Marguerite Duras (Marguerite Duras), the French writer and director who in 1984 won the Goncourt prize for her novel L'Amant (The Lover) and in 1960 wrote the novel Hiroshima, my love which was transferred with great success to the cinema, winning an award at Cannes, while also being nominated for the Oscars...?
Are they kinder to a lady?
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"Marguerite Duras the worn-out pope of clogged sewers makes me sick"
PIERRE DESPROGES (Environmentalist -comedian one man show) at Times of ordinary hate
"The Goncourt prize that the Goncourt brothers established to reward works of young talent was awarded on November 13, 1984 to The Lover, the 27th novel of the seventy-year-old author, a former secretary for the colonies until the Pétain era. For an all-carnal love story set on tropical islands, pretty well priced in the opinion of my knowledgeable husband, who of course never fell asleep reading Proust!
PIERRE DESPROGES in the L'almanach
“My publishers beg me to take as an example Marguerite Duras whose books are very short at only 140 pages. This author discovered an awesome trick! It makes them so boring and dull to give the impression that they are big!
SAN ANTONIO in the Princess with feet in the air
"We laugh in every line and feel ashamed because our laughter comes at the expense of the poor who are given the right to express themselves only with screams and inarticulate screams! Poor Marguerite Duras doesn't seem to me to have met many in her life, even when she was a soldier in the Communist Party"
ANGELO RINALDI (Corsican writer, literary critic, member of the French Academy) in the magazineL'express, February 2, 1990
"In Dyras even the natural decor is fake"
HENRY JEANSON (French screenwriter, author, journalist)
"Durasoire!" pun of the author's name with dérisoire meaning ridiculous, mocking
HENRI-JEANSON
“Your prose makes me yawn, it's beyond me. For someone like me who suffers from insomnia, your works should be prescribed by the Social Security Administration so I don't have to take sleeping pills!”
ERIC NEUHOFF (journalist, film critic, writer) at Periscope, 9-1-1980
"It is the meeting of sexual exhaustion with today's society that is doomed to look everywhere for the mirrors of the demolition of its values"
JEAN-EDERN HALLIER (author, essayist, journalist)
"In an empty room, on an empty table, a man writes a letter to his mistress. He tells her why he is writing this letter, why he addresses it to her with particularity, and endlessly narrates various incomprehensible and insignificant events that are fragments of an indifferent and ungrateful life. The man's voice recites the letter and during it we see a close-up of a hand writing. The hand can belong to anyone, but such a text can only be signed by Marguerite Ntyras!"
JACQUES STERNBERG (Belgian writer-essayist) at Les chroniques de France - evening, 1971 (France-soir is a daily newspaper with a large circulation)
"There's only one thing I can't forgive her for. This title "Hiroshima my love.
I went to Hiroshima. Terrifying sight. It's like going to Auschwitz and then writing "Auschwitz my donut"
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR (author) at Le journal de Sunday, 2-12-1984 (The largest French Sunday newspaper)
"It's no secret to anyone that she's hot! And these Goncourt fools awarding her, allowed her to spread in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Thus, while before she was tired and "broken" by only a handful of her readers, now suddenly the whole of France is obliged to suffer the thought of Marguerite Duras"
JD in the L'écho des savannas, May 1991
“Duras' books age badly, as do her films. Too many spells, gurus, hypnosis...we'd say "fake Chinese"
PHILIPPE SOLLERS (French writer)
"Her writing moves ever closer to an abysmal ground zero, where squalor adjoins the precious, banality co-exists with emphasis, and verbal tic serves her mysterious allusions. . . . Except for her book 'Pain', all the other which follow are addressed again exclusively to her strictly obedient readers"
GIOVANNI BOGLIOLO (Italian academic) in the newspaper La stampa
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Giota A.