The Wartime Notebooks, by Marguerite Duras, trans. Linda Coverdale

What is it that places Marguerite Duras in a category apart from – and, many hold, above – her slightly older French contemporaries? Just to take the women, her novels have aged better than de Beauvoir's, her autobiographical work has a lighter, finer timbre than Leduc's, and her experiments in the nouveau roman are more moving than Sarraute's. She shares a post-colonial link with the Algerian-born Camus, but Duras's pictures of Indochine never pretend to Camus' kind of existential universality. Like Salgado's photographs, their strength lies in their particularity: her portrayals of deprivation and exploitation in the Mekong delta make the reader, across the barrier of time and space, feel guilty and complicit, just as her harrowing portraits of wartime France erase the boundary between collaborator and partisan.

Far from being the detritus of a writer's desk, Duras's Wartime Notebooks are richly detailed and, given their unfinished nature, oddly satisfying. "Childhood and Adolescence in Indochina" is an early draft of The Lover. The Chinese man, the adolescent girl, the starved and sordid colonial setting are all here; but in place of the exquisite Vietnamese setting, we have the crude reality of her South-East Asian adolescence: the filthy cinema, the scraps of refuse eaten at meals, the desperation and desire that drive her to near-prostitution.

But is this plain autobiography? Later, Duras laid a careful paper trail to identify herself as the heroine of The Lover: interviews in which she spoke of her fluency in Vietnamese, photographs in Vietnamese dress, looking like a native girl or a Eurasian. Here the adolescent heroine is portrayed as gangly, freckled, redhaired, a "blanche" in a sea of brown faces.

Was the unconscious novelist in Duras already turning the events of her life into fiction, realising that a Eurasian-looking narrator would subvert her boiling phenomenology of colonialism? Did an attempt at memoir turn imperceptibly into The Sea Wall, that heavily fictionalised account of her youth also included here in draft? Critics doubted Duras's claim that La Douleur derived from a diary found in a drawer.

The version here proves her right in part; there's scarcely any difference between the published version and these pages. The writing is dense, harrowing, beautiful. But the text here is incomplete. Is there another, missing diary, or did Duras again complete an abandoned account from memory?

The most accomplished pieces here are the short stories in the final section. They don't have the lyrical minimalism Duras perfected in the 1950s; she demonstrates her skill more in the workings of a unique eye that sees the raw sinews of longing beneath the skin. In "The Bible", an 18-year-old girl's scarcely older lover is obsessed with the story of Mohammed and the eternal idea of God. An unbeliever, she reflects on Christ, whose death proved that he was only a man, like her father who "died, crushed by a tip cart, a year before his retirement. He'd been the victim of an injustice that had begun a long, long time ago. That injustice had never ceased upon the earth".

This conflation of man and Christ, this shattered meditation on the body, personal and political, pervades the book. In "Rue St Benoit", the narrator hears two people singing in "the hour meant for sleep... where the two slopes of the night meet, arose that song: it was a red flower blooming suddenly from a night of stone. A song against death, to make you move mountains. All my flesh began to cry out and I wanted a man..." Duras's song against death reverberates throughout the once and future works of one of the greatest lyrical voices of our time.

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