The Malady of Death

By Marguerite Duras

“[An] erotic, existential mystery . . . part philosophical meditation, part fantasy” from the Prix Goncourt-winning author of The Lover (The Guardian).

A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a “she,” a warm, moist body with a beating heart—the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn to love. It isn’t a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to try . . .

This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, “perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe,” and its absence, “the malady of death.”

“The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras’ unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning.”—Le Monde

“Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential.”—Translation Review

Praise for Marguerite Duras’s international bestseller, The Lover

“Powerful, authentic, completely successful . . . perfect.”—The New York Times Book Review

“An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl.”—Boston Herald
  
“A vivid, lingering novel . . . a brilliant work of art.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780802190581

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was one of Europe’s most distinguished writers. The author of many novels and screenplays, she is perhaps best known outside France for her filmscript Hiroshima Mon Amour and her Prix Goncourt-winning novel THE LOVER, also filmed. Her other books include LA DOLEUR, BLUE EYES BLACK HAIR, SUMMER RAIN and THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. Born in Indochina in 1914, Marguerite Duras died in 1996.

Book preview

The Malady of Death

WORKS BY MARGUERITE DURAS

PUBLISHED BY GROVE WEIDENFELD

DESTROY, SHE SAID

FOUR NOVELS:

THE SQUARE;

MODERATO CANTABILE;

TEN-THIRTY ON A SUMMER NIGHT;

THE AFTERNOON OF MR. ANDESMAS

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

INDIA SONG

THE MALADY OF DEATH

PRACTICALITIES

The Malady of Death

by

MARGUERITE DURAS

translated from the French

by Barbara Bray

GROVE WEIDENFELD

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1986 by Marguerite Duras

Translation copyright © 1986 by Barbara Bray

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove / Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011.

Originally published in 1982 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duras, Marguerite

The malady of death.

Translation of: La maladie de la morte.

1. Duras, Marguerite—Translations, English. 1. Title.

PQ2607.U8245A2    1986        843'912    83-49427

ISBN 0-8021-3036-4 (pbk.)

e-ISBN 978-0-8021-9058-1

Cover photography by David Hamilton

Cover design by Robert Anthony, Inc.

Design by Hannah Lerner

Reviews for The Malady of Death

[Glenn Ritchey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For established fans of Duras, and Catherine Breillat's, Anatomy of Hell.

[m2gilbert · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This review could easily end up being longer than the actual text, which is approximately 5,000 words. I am fighting sleep at this hour to explain why I enjoyed this book immensely. It is a a moving, erotic story that explores the relationship between sex, love, and death. The book is really about a soul which has died and its means of finding love through (as it seems) "meaningless" sex, often in complete silence, a strange kind of voiceless ecstasy. A man (whom the author addresses as "you") hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea where he suffers and longs to feel something, anything, in that brief period of time. The language of the text is what I would expect from Marguerite Duras: terse yet lyrical prose, moving in the way it injects simple, familiar words with the weight of emptiness and passion and suffering. I could read this book again (it would take all but 30 minutes if I linger on a passage or two) and be moved in the same way as I was the first time. The most remarkable exchange between the man and women occurs here, perhaps my favorite lines in the entire work: "You ask how loving can happen--the emotion of loving. She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? She says: It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, oneself, often without knowing how."

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

La maladie de la mort is a surrealistic short novel about a man who pays a woman to stay with him in a house near the sea. All day and all night, the young woman lies, sleeping or slumbering in bed. The man, who has never had a lover, cannot bring himself to love, to possess the woman. From unrecorded words she murmurs in her sleep, the man's condition is pronounced as La maladie de la mort.La maladie de la mort is an enigmatic tale with the quality of an allegory. The story was almost conceived like the oracle in Delphi, as during the dictation Marguerite Duras was heavily intoxicated. The man, sometimes thought to be gay, may stand for all men, and his inability to love, not just for the act of love, but inability for true love. Elsewhere, Marguerite Duras has said that she sees herself as a woman who has always lived in houses near the sea, and that her writing, as the true writing of all women should be, about desire. The inaction of the man effectively shows him to be impotent, while the woman in her passivity seems to take control.La maladie de la mort has a very poetic quality, and reads almost as much as a dramatic monologue.

[varielle_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Maybe if I were an existentialist I would have appreciated this more. Depressed individual hires a woman to stay with him by the sea for a few days to try to learn how to love. He wasn't successful, but at least nobody got murdered, we think, though that could explain the disappearance. Hmmm. There was just entirely too much sleeping going on.

[eavans-914612 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Vampiric...