‘The Pure Number’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Mark Polizotti

The boundary between fiction and essay in Marguerite Duras is quite slender. ‘The Pure Number’ destroys me in ways I’d rather not explain or describe.

First published as ‘Le Nombre Pur’ in Écrire, Gallimard, 1993. First published in translation in Writing, University of Minnesota Press, 2011