The Shameless

The Shameless is the first novel by the French writer Marguerite Duras. Published in 1943 under the pen name "Duras," it was originally titled La Famille Taneran and is also known in translation as The Impudent Ones. The novel revolves around Madame Taneran and her two children. The elder son, Jacques, leads an idle life of luxury and danger, yet is always his mother's unconditional favorite; the whole family scrimps and saves to pay his bills and settle his debts. The daughter, Maud, is the neglected one; she longs for independence and to escape this suffocating home, yet long-standing cowardice keeps her from leaving. The mother dotes on the son, the son demands money from the mother and sabotages his sister's love, and the daughter can only struggle between her hunger for maternal love and her resentment of her brother. The family torments one another, and no one finds happiness. On the title page Duras wrote, "To my brother, whom I did not know," and said, "This book fell out of me: fear and desire, born of the malice of a hard childhood." The prose is elegant, very different from the hard, forceful style of Duras's later work, yet it already plants the themes she would write about all her life: mother–daughter relations, a mother who plays favorites, a banished daughter, poverty and shame one cannot escape. Its characters and its view of love set the tone for later works such as The Lover. This edition is part of Shanghai Translation Publishing House's 2025 Duras Pocket Edition series, using Gui Yufang's translation: a portable small format, about 86,000 characters in all.