"We now understand Duras’ books should not be put into the hands of oversensitive readers. Let them go see the films and the plays; they will encounter the same malady of distress but subdued, wrapped in a dreamy charm that softens it and also makes it more feigned and made up - a convention. Her books, on the contrary, bring us to the verge of madness. they do not point to it from afar, they neither observe it nor analyze it for the sake of experiencing it at a distance in the hope of a solution, like it or not, some day or other… to the contrary, the texts domesticate the malady of death, they fuse with it, are on the same level with it, without either distance or perspective. There is no purification in store for us at the conclusion of those novels written on the brink of illness, no improvement, no promise of a beyond, not even the enchanting beauty of style or irony that might provide a bonus of pleasure in addition to the revealed evil."