‘The Malady of Death’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray

Duras is someone I discovered in my early twenties who, as I’m now in the mid-stages of completing a PhD on her work (alongside that of Paul Celan), one of the writers I read most frequently. This short, intense work opens with a direct sexual address in the second person.

“You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.”

The personal and anonymous are united from the outset. The text hovers, like that of another book later on this list (one that Duras translated and staged) with the presence of death in life, of a life that does nothing but die while it is living, living in the grip of its inevitability. In the meantime, we dance around the bed. In Duras, the locus of desire as a dissolving infinity is too often used to psychoanalyse away the philosophical and political commitments of her work, transmute them into inwardness. Rather, the logic of desire always operates in the shadow of historical obliteration: commodified, genocidal, colonial. Through this framework Duras continually tries to give us a new experience of time. Thank you for coming to my viva.

La maladie de la mort, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit 1982; English translation published by Grove Atlantic, 1986

‘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

‘Moderato Cantabile’ by Marguerite Duras, trans. Richard Seaver

Another example of a short novel that demands to be taken in a single draught, my definition of short fiction. Read as a story of an almost-affair between two people brought together, as so often in Duras’s stories, by death and eroticism, it will leave you feeling bereft, that something was unsaid that should have been voiced. Read again, without the tension of wondering whether the affair is to be consummated, certain motifs become evident. Without psychological exposition, little plot and the barest of resolution, different readings become possible, almost blank pages that rest on the collaboration of reader and writer.

Published by John Calder, 1966, also available from Oneworld Classics, 2008