From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras's
haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was torn
asunder
Written in 1944 and first published in 1985, Duras's riveting account of
life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of
liberation depicts the harrowing realities of World War II-era France
with a rich conviction enhanced by [a] spare, almost arid, technique
(Julian Barnes, The Washington Post Book World ). Duras, by then
married and part of a French resistance network headed by François
Mitterand, tells of nursing her starving husband back to health after
his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator,
and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who was
attracted to her. The result is more than one woman's diary . . . [it
is] a haunting portrait of a time and a place and also a state of mind
(The New York Times).