The life of Duras the durable

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In 1984, Marguerite Duras published L'Amant (The Lover). She was 70 years old. The novel told a strange, apparently autobiographical story, about a white girl in French Indo-China at the beginning of the 1930s. Her family - widowed mother, beloved younger brother and crazy elder brother - are poor, emotionally incestuous, definitely unhinged. She embarks on an affair with a much older, extremely wealthy Chinese man. The book swells with heat, sex and unhappiness, and with a terrible sense of shame.

The Lover was short, glamorous and elegantly written. To publicise it, Duras spoke frankly on French television about her Saigon childhood, wartime Paris, the Communist Party she joined in 1944. The next morning, the bookshop queues stretched out of the door. Duras also spoke about her alcoholism. She was a lifelong drunk, and it nearly killed her many times before she finally died in 1996. "Alcohol was invented to help us tolerate the void that is the universe," she once wrote.

Melodramatic, prolific and a pathological self-dramatiser, "la Duras" was one of 20th-century France's great creative figures. She wrote novels, novellas, plays and film scripts - most famously Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960), for Alain Resnais. From the late 1960s until the early 1980s, she made her own films also: G?rard Depardieu turns up as a washing machine salesman in Nathalie Granger (1972). Her books are short, elliptical and sombre, full of dark thoughts and long pauses ("like a Bette Davis hiding within a Gertrude Stein," as David Thomson strikingly puts it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film). Ideas and images are endlessly recycled and reworked.

The white girl with the oriental lover is one of several central allegories to which Duras's writings return, again and again, over their 50-year span.

Another has to do with the Nazi occupation of France. In 1942, Duras took a job with the state paper allocation agency (in essence a censorship organisation). A year later, she and her husband joined the Resistance, and were active until he was arrested in 1944 and deported to Buchenwald. The story of his eventual return is told in La Douleur (1985), a book which in some circles has become, as Duras's publisher calls it, "a sacred text". La Douleur also tells apparently autobiographical stories about collaboration and torture. Exactly how much were they drawn from life?

The Chinese lover does seem to have existed. In this book, Laure Adler claims to have met his nephew in present-day Vietnam. The affair appears to have been sanctioned by the 15-year-old Duras's widowed mother and her violent, opium-addicted elder brother, who hoped to make money from the deal. The status of the wartime stories is murkier. Duras's Resistance cell was led by Francois Mitterrand, the former French president. La Douleur was "not the most scrupulous of her works", he said wryly in 1994. He added that Duras had probably been sleeping with a Gestapo agent herself while her husband was in the camps.

This is an authorised biography. Laure Adler interviewed Duras over two years in order to prepare it, and had access to previously unpublished notebooks and papers. To her credit, she doesn't seem overly infatuated with her subject. The book is certainly not a whitewash job. But it is vague and disorganised in places, and doesn't ever quite manage definitively to sort the facts from the fiction. The details of Duras's life story remain blurry at the edges. As she herself would have wanted, no doubt. But Adler is good at putting Duras into context. Her Communism, her radical-chic posturing during the ?v?nements of May 1968 ("I was there night and day," she wrote to a young admirer), illustrates the way in which, for a generation of French intellectuals, post-war political dramas became a way of reliving the excitement of life under enemy occupation. Perhaps they also became a way of avoiding painful questions about what one should or shouldn't have done between 1940 and 1944.

Duras, Adler tells us, "detested Simone de Beauvoir". Beauvoir (and Sartre) detested her back. Adler has disappointingly little to say about the whys and wherefores. But you can imagine Beauvoir, straight-backed, hair up, being appalled by the self-indulgent messiness of the younger woman's life and work. And you can imagine her also secretly wondering if in a way, Duras was not closer to the truth of things with her confusion, her blunders, her indelible sense of shame.