India Song

Marguerite Duras

6/2015 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Táto e‑kniha

Unseen voices narrate this story of the affair between the haunting Anne-Marie Stretter and the disgraced French vice-consul in Làhore. In the India of 1937, with the smell of laurels and leprosy permeating the air, the characters perform a dance of doomed love to the strains of a dying colonialism.

Originally commissioned as a play for Britain’s National Theatre,India Song was made into a film that premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. American Cinematographer praised it for its “imaginative use of voices creating an echo chamber effect that perpetuates the past,” and Molly Haskell called it “Marguerite Duras’ most perfectly realized film, the most feminine film I have seen, a rarefied work of lyricism, despair, and passion, imbued with a kind of primitive emotional hunger that is all the more moving for its austere setting.”

O autorovi

Marguerite Duras was born in Gia-Dinh, Indochina on April 4, 1914. After attending school in Saigon, she moved to Paris, France to study law and political science. After graduation, she worked as a secretary in the French Ministry of the Colonies until 1941. During World War II, she joined the Resistance and published her first books. After the liberation, she became a member of the French Communist Party, and though she later resigned, she always described herself as a Marxist. Her first book, Les Impudents, was published in 1943. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 70 novels, plays, screenplays and adaptations. Her novels include The Sea Wall, The Lover, The Lover from Northern China, The War, and That's All. In 1959, she wrote her first film scenario, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and has since been involved in a number of other films, including India Song, Baxter, Vera Baxter, Le Camion (The Truck), and The Lover. She died on March 4, 1996 at the age of 81.