Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of the nuclear blast was the only sovereign truth Hiroshima offered us. He’d gone on to declare that instant, that blast, “a vanishing splendor.” Duras was herself not such a sick puppy as Bataille, but the common interpretation of her script for Hiroshima mon amour as “anti-nuclear,” a treatise on peace, is not quite correct. It’s more accurate to say that Duras both condemned human suffering and then again framed it as the only vital condition for the possibility of meaning.

Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, and tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”