The Story inside the Story

When she was old, too, grey-haired, she went to the photographer’s, alone, and had her photograph taken in her best dark red dress and her two bits of jewellery, the locket and the gold and jade brooch, a little round of jade sheathed in gold. In her photo her hair’s done nicely, her clothes just so, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
The better-off natives used to go to the photographer’s too, just once in their lives, when they saw death was near. Their photos were large, all the same size, hung in handsome gilt frames near the altars to their ancestors. All these photographs of different people, and I’ve seen many of them, give practically identical results, the resemblance was stunning. It wasn’t just because all old people look alike, but because the portraits themselves were invariably touched up in such a way that any facial pecularities, if there were any left, were minimized. All the faces were prepared in the same way to confront eternity, all toned down, all uniformly rejuvenated. (...) And they all wore an expression I’d still recognize anywhere.

My mother’s expression in the photograph with the red dress was the same. Noble, some would say. Others would call it withdrawn.

Bilelim Öğrenelim. Öğrenelim Şaşalım.

Duras, based the book on her own life and was 70, an old woman, when she wrote it. It went on to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary prize, sold over 3 million copies in France alone.

Marguerite Donnadieu was born on April 14, 1914 in Gia Dinh, a town in the south of French Indochina, now Vietnam, north of Saigon. At age 15, she met Lee, a rich young Chinese man – the Lover. In 1984, when her most successful book established her fame; she was seperated from her second husband, alcoholic, and living with a much younger man.

Throughout her life, Duras stuck to her guns, which made her difficult to live and work with. She herself said, “I’m not sure I could put up with Duras.”

She died in Paris in 1996 and is buried along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Eugene Ionesco and Guy de Maupassant, in the Cimetière de Montparnasse.