No More

In her last book, Marguerite Duras meditates with a fierce poetic fervor on facing death, her life’s literary work, and love.

Sex, and death. All of Marguerite Duras’s writings are suffused with the certitude that absolute love is both necessary (sex) and impossible to achieve (death). But no book of hers embodies this idea so powerfully, so excessively, as No More (C'est Tout), the book she composed during the last year of her life until just days before her death.

No More (C'est Tout) is literature shorn of all its niceties, a shout from the depths of Duras’s being, celebrating life in defiance of the death she knew had already entered her immediate future. In part, it is also Duras’ raucous salutation welcoming death. No More is a collection as pure as poetry and her words and ideas recirculate in hypnotic fits of lucidity, desperation, and noise, but the overall effect is both unsettling and, at times, piercingly true.