Blue Eyes, Black Hair - Mil Folhas Collection 18

Blue Eyes, Black Hair is a text on the edge of the unmentionable. The most irreducibly Durassian work Duras ever published. For this very reason, it is the most remarkable: simultaneously mysterious and terrifyingly clear.
Upon reading it, one might always think it is a text "too personal to be written, placing the reader in the uncomfortable position of reading a secret diary that does not concern them". In essence, the exact opposite is true; there is nothing here that commonly transpires between two people, no ordinary feelings or declarations of passion.
Inevitably, a text about Blue Eyes, Black Hair ends up being peripheral. This happens when a book deals with the only two issues worth any book dealing with: love and death, in their most uncomfortable strangeness. One can almost never say that the rest is unimportant without at the same time being ridiculously pretentious.
Duras manages, without pomp or circumstance, to make us understand that reaching the last day is not tragically important. As she says, a thousand years from now, a thousand years will have passed, day by day, since that day existed. Centuries from now, the last day will be a dated day, nothing more. Making this single truth intelligible in a non-painful way is the first version of this book's existence; it is the central difference that makes it a desperately happy book. That is why it should be read...