SOURCE: “Life in a Moment,” in The Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 1984, p. 1118.

In the following review of the English translation of L'amant and Whole Days in the Trees, Gunn finds similarities between the two books despite the thirty years between their publications.

Marguerite Duras is a writer whose next move only the foolhardy would predict. Yet, when viewed retrospectively, her work displays a curious singleness of purpose, an inevitability, almost, of direction. These two books are divided by thirty years yet linked by their preoccupations and prevailing currents of feeling.

Duras's recent fictions have been short, strange, and disturbing. In them, sexual acts (though not always what we presumptuously call the sexual act) have provided the focus, while often making themselves known only in a narrative told largely in the conditional tense, and through the mediation of a voyeuristic eye (or “I”). L'amant, her new novel, also has...