Books: Let Me Count the Ways

FOUR NOVELS by Marguerite Duras. 303 pages. Grove Press. $3.95.

Marguerite Duras is a fashionable French novelist whose work declines as her reputation grows. The Sea Wall (1950), her first novel, was a book of unusual promise: a gruelingly realistic description of life on a moldering plantation in French Indo-China, where she grew up. Since then, Author Duras has had very little to say, but she has shown uncommon ingenuity in finding new ways to say it. She studied the “ex-teriorist” novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute and learned to create characters that are all skin and no insides. She tried her hand at avantgarde drama and learned to produce dialogue so obscure it passes for profound. She wrote several scripts (Hiroshima, Man Amour, Moderate Cantabile) for the French New Wave directors and learned to compose prose that reads like camera directions—possibly economical, certainly cheap. All these skills are brought relentlessly to bear in this collection of four short novels that profess to describe four different “modes” of love. They were received with grave respect by the French, who are sometimes difficult for foreigners to understand.