The War

One of France’s greatest novelists offers a remarkable diary of the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II and of its eventual liberation by the Allies. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the liberation, this extraordinary diary by the author of The Lover is “a haunting portrait of a time and place” (New York Times).

Written in 1944, and first published in 1985, Duras’s riveting account of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first few 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).