Written out of Duras’s experience of occupied Paris and its immediate aftermath. 

At its centre is Duras waiting for the return of her husband Robert Antelme, a Resistance member deported to the concentration camps, and then confronting the barely living man who eventually comes home. Around this are other pieces drawn from the same period: encounters with collaborators, Gestapo officers, Resistance networks and the moral confusion of liberation. 

The title means simply “pain,” constructed in fragments, repetitions and abrupt shifts, allowing private obsession to collide with historical catastrophe and express such a complicated, human experience. The result is one of her starkest works: about waiting, political violence, complicity, love, bodily survival and the strange problem of turning lived horror into literature at all.

Flamingo / Fontana Paperbacks, London, 1987. First Flamingo edition. Paperback. First published in France by P.O.L éditeur in 1985; first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 1986. English translation by Barbara Bray. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with mild edge and corner wear; age-toning to pages. Internally clean and binding firm. Very good condition.