A summer with... Marguerite Duras

The July and August sun softened the windows of Saint-Benoît Street with the same force as the scorching afternoons in Saigon. The heat of her first sex and that of her now-extinguished desire were suffocating for Marguerite Duras . Her entire life she carried her body like a crematorium, a burning cauldron of punishment, joy, and penance. Summer lives on in Marguerite Duras 's writing as a memory of the beatings she received equally from her mother, her brother, and life. A la française is read with blisters on the spirit. She is direct and abrasive, a fire in one's hands.

Summer appears clearly in the moment a lover turns on the fan next to the freshly showered body of a teenage girl, just as that older man did in the Mekong Delta she described in "The Lover," that screen of her own life through which she offers us her remains. Summer in Duras is the vapor of a port city. Duras's life has something of a solstice and a bonfire about it. It burns without possible redemption. Her work breathes summer everywhere. It is brutal like a twilight. A tap about to be turned off.

Her first lover, the death of her first son, her years in the Resistance, deportation, and the return of her husband, Robert Antelme, from Nazi Germany. Life happens hourly, persisting from morning to noon. "Always nothing," she wrote in her notebooks, tearing off her own skin to fry it in the oil of her days. The poverty of her years in present-day Vietnam, domestic violence, tensions between the French and the colonists, and her discovery of desire and sex in this context all assign Marguerite Duras the status of a combatant, or worse, someone trying to stay alive. A soldier of eternal summer.

Sara, the protagonist of 'The Little Horses of Tarquinia' (Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia, 1953), is a natural summer creature. She is married and the mother of a young son. She spends her summer holidays with her husband, son, and a group of friends in a coastal town in Italy, near Tarquinia. She is trapped in a stifling summer routine, both because of the heat and because of a married life that feels empty, repetitive, and distant. Her boredom is immense, unfathomable. "There was nothing to do here; the books melted in our hands. And the stories crumbled to pieces under the somber, silent blows of the large wasps. Yes, the heat lacerated our hearts. And only the desire for the sea remained whole, unspoiled. Sara left the book on the terrace steps. The others were already in the sea. Or, if they weren't, they were about to dive in at any moment."

In the summer of 1980, Duras wrote a series of weekly chronicles for Libération, published between June and August, later compiled in the volume 'L'Été 80'. She spent that time in Trouville-sur-Mer , in a house by the Atlantic. There she met Yann Andréa, the student with whom she began a platonic and poetic relationship that would mark the end of that summer and the rest of her life. "The summer of wind and rain. The summer of Gdansk... The summer of our history... between Yann Andréa Steiner and that woman who made books, old and solitary." Duras reflected that summer is not only a landscape but a mode of writing: long days, a sense of waiting, a mixture of intimacy and warm air that intensifies inner perception. She is herself that conflagration of wasted days and fruits about to spoil. Immense, Duras, in her insolation and desolation.