Practicalities (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

I just finished reading L’Amant (The Lover) by Marguerite Duras in the original French. I totally understand why Duras was so disappointed with the 1992 film that was based on her novel, saying she didn’t recognize her story at all. This is NOT a romance novel. It is a novel of self-annihilation, of existential ennui and alienation, of children from a highly dysfunctional home who become broken people, little bits of flotsam adrift on tropical waters between France and Vietnam.

To me, there was nothing erotic or sensual about L’Amant, contrary to what I expected. It is written in a strikingly original, jarring, stream-of-consciousness style that immerses the reader in the protagonist’s state of mind. She repeats herself often, like a drunken confession. Primarily, the novel is one of shame and alienation, and to this end it is extremely effective.

BEYOND a certain vogue, as I remember, for ''Bonjour Tristesse'' and Albert Camus, a pious regard for Proust and Flaubert, and an occasional attempt at something almost-English, like the fussy, Gothic work of Michel Tournier, Americans on the whole do not get on with the French novel, and certainly not with the French experimental writers with whom Marguerite Duras is most often linked. It is true that in much of her work, Miss Duras uses obscurity - or at least manner and formal control - to combat or disguise her tendency to be melodramatic and sentimental. But in her small, perfect, new novel, she has found in reworking material she has used before - material evidently full of personal meaning - a felicitous and masterly balance between formalism and powerful emotional effect. ''The Lover,'' in this fine translation by Barbara Bray, is accessible the way Thomas Mann's ''Death in Venice'' or D. M. Thomas's ''White Hotel'' are accessible, both because of the interesting narrative particulars - one might say the surface of the works - and because they deal successfully with strong basic themes of erotic love and death.
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The story is told by a narrator, now in her 60's, whose life resembles in some details Miss Duras's own. She is looking back on an episode of her adolescence and its emotional consequences on her life since. She describes herself now as ''ravaged,'' emotionally dead, and it is because of the intensity with which she felt then, at her initiation into sexual love when she was 15 1/2, a high-school student in Indochina. She was picked up by a rich young Chinese man in his limousine and went with him to his apartment, where he became her lover. She went with him every day.

This is in Saigon, where Miss Duras was born and grew up. The narrator's French family is bound in poverty and unhappiness, the father dead, an older brother whom she fears, a younger whom she loves, a mother whom she loves, pities and dislikes. The mother and brothers know and do not know of her affair, her disgrace. It is never acknowledged or discussed. Sometimes the lover takes them all to dinner:

''My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don't look at him either. They can't. They're incapable of it. . . . He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It's as if he hadn't spoken, as if nobody had heard.''

The lover and the girl singlemindedly indulge their passion, described in language characteristically both lurid and flat: ''I used to watch what he did with me, how he used me, and I'd never thought anyone could act like that, he acted beyond my hope and in accordance with my body's destiny.'' As in many of her other works such as ''Moderato Cantabile'' or ''The Ravishing of Lol Stein,'' Miss Duras's female protagonist is a dreamlike slave of love, sexual almost against her will, driven by desire but also passive, and it is her passivity and desire that compel the male. To him she is a treasured object, a captive, possessed and imprisoned. There is no doubt these are archetypes of female sexual fantasy. But perhaps only the fantasies of women of a certain age? M OREOVER, the lover is Oriental (as in her well-known screenplay for the film ''Hiroshima Mon Amour''). That is, he is exotic and forbidden, the more attractive for being forbidden. (It seems that interracial passion in literature in English has usually meant that the woman was Oriental - and it was a long time before anyone went beyond ''Eurasian.'') In any case, to go with such a man is emblematic of sin and rebellion. Like Mr. Rochester or Heathcliff, he is rich, dark, mysterious. His car is a mythic black limousine: ''Yes, it's the big funeral car that's in my books. It's a Morris Leon-Bollee. The black Lancia at the French embassy in Calcutta hasn't yet made its entrance on the literary scene.'' His potency is dependable and she is always desired - he is the perfect dream lover, and this is all the very stuff of romance.

THE LOVER, a novel by Marguerite Duras, is a book I've had on my to-read list ever since I read a review of the film adaptation more than twenty years ago. The book is probably autobiographical fiction, since I have read that almost all of Duras's books are based on her own life. The book was first published in 1984 and Duras died in 1996.

While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.

The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.

But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -

"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..."

Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."

One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple -

"... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."

Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I had never read any of Marguerite Duras' work, and I found myself enjoying her short novel, The Lover. It must have been quite daring for its time, a story of a very young woman (a girl really--she is only 16) and her lover. It is a very French novel, sophisticated and tart, but never sour. The Wartime Notebooks, mostly memories of her childhood as French Colonialism was coming to a close. It is a lively memoir scattered with fine details that may or may not be completely true, but which are certainly interesting. Less enjoyable but still interesting are the collection of essays called Practicalities, a group of short pieces that cover a number of memories and feelings about her life.

The volume itself is beautifully made and quite luxurious, with creamy paper and a lovely bookmark ribbon. I did find the print rather faint and difficult to read, but that may be more my aging eyes than the printing itself. If you don't have perfect eyesight, you might find yourself squinting and pulling the pages close to your face.

All in all, this is a lovely book of fiction and essays by a writer who lived like I always envisioned French women living during the wartime years.

Marguerite Duras has written a compelling book set in Vietnam in the 1930’s when the French presence was emphatic. Two young students, a pre-pubescent budding girl in a hat and a Chinese man, almost as young, see each other as they move through water on a boat to somewhere. Somehow the rich and gentle and determined man finds the girl in a boarding school, has a limousine retrieve her, and they become lovers. The veiled, nuanced, and novice encounters are almost erotic in description and highly evocative in the compelling and powerful coming of age.

The fierce character of the girl’s mother is so invigorated by the wealth of the young man that the contrast with the boy’s father--adamant about the impossibility of the affair—propels the plot. The innocence and intensity of the young lovers contrasts painfully with the worldliness of the each one’s parents. Although love affair moves toward the inevitable, the ending of the book is gratifying and affirming.

This Everyman's Library volume contains a thoughtful introduction, the wonderful chronology that distinguishes the series, and three books by Marguerite Duras, an intellectual and novelist of post-WW2 France: The Lover, her most famous novel; Wartime Notebooks, about her experiences during the war; and Practicalities, personal essays dictated late in her life.

Duras is a talented writer. The Lover is a well-written erotic novella, more sexy than explicit, and the Notebooks are quite interesting, but my favorite section was the collection of essays which covers a wide variety of topics such as alcohol, men, writers' bodies, photographs, house and home, the theatre, Hanoi. the red sofa and many others. I found these quite charming, short (to very short) pieces that reveal a keen wit and a sharp eye -- or maybe a keen eye and a sharp wit.

Everyman's Library always does a superb job and this is no exception.

This volume is a perfect introduction to the work of Marguerite Duras. It contains The Lover (her best-known novel) and two of her nonfiction works: Wartime Notebooks (a series of autobiographical pieces and early versions of future work) and Practicalities (a series of brief pieces written near the end of her life).

The Lover is one of my favorite books of all time, a masterpiece of spare prose. It's under 100 pages, so it's not exactly a huge time commitment.

The Wartime Notebooks are a mixed bag. Some of the pieces feel fragmentary, but it's interesting to see the genesis of some of Duras' later works.

Practicalities is an interesting set of short pieces that were dictated and then later edited by Duras. It's the sort of thing you can dip in and out of.

The book is a very nice edition, with good quality paper and an attached ribbon bookmark.

Purchased this book, because I was riveted by Jane March's gorgeous face.

Complex book. I didn't always connect with the story or the writing, but I did enjoy reading the book. There is a drowsy, hypnotic quality to this book. Beautiful, intense, emotional, maudlin, and sometimes, pondering.

Most acutely rendered were her mother's obsessive love for the protagonist's oldest brother - a wastrel, who abused and destroyed all around him. Everyone could not help giving into him, though he had no regard for any of them.

The poverty is written about acutely. I most appreciated the sentiment about having the luxury to decline to eat.

Story of the love affair was too precious at times. Probably my least favorite parts of the book.

I did like the end though.

Overall, I liked that book.

I found the story moving, and the writing as well as structure of the novel original. The prose is obviously very literary. It was sometimes deeply beautiful... and sometimes too cryptic for my tastes (despite the fact I minored in literature). Same for the jumps in time in the narration. Sometimes I thought it was well inserted. Sometimes I thought it didn't bring anything.
But, I'll mostly remember how the jumps back and forth make the viewer feel as if we are in the author's head, as she's evoking various important, defining moments of her life. It's sometimes almost like a roller-coaster as you follow the trail of her mind connecting one memory to another. I also liked how her narrative voice is sometimes the voice of the young girl she was. We're not only told what happened, we're made to experience it more directly.

Despite some parts that didn't really resonate with me, in the end I really think it's a strong story difficult to forget. The last words especially were very touching.

This is a very nice compilation of The Lover, the Duras Wartime Notebooks, and the series of essays in Practicalities. In particular, I think the notebooks offer a good background and place-statement for those interested primarily in The Lover. The shorter essays on motherhood, sex, and writing are interesting, but probably not essential. For a course, I would assign the whole volume and be happy that the volume exists.

Marguerite Duras deserves to be better known today. Perhaps this handsome new collection of her writings put forth by Everyman's Library will make that happen. It contains her most well known work, the novella 'The Lover' set in French Indochine about a young French girl's love affair with a wealthy Chinese man. It also contains her Wartime Notebooks, and Practicalities a series of personal essays.

Winner of France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 1984, "The Lover" is a tautly written, first person narrative of a fifteen year old French girl's affair with a Chinese man nearly twice her age in Vietnam circa 1930. Like other works of Marguerite Duras, "The Lover" conflates a vivid and deeply sensuous literary imagination with thinly-veiled autobiographical elements and a non-linear, ever shifting perspective. The result is a short, powerful novel of memory and erotic yearning. a novel which lingers in the reader's mind long after the last page.
Neither the girl nor her Chinese lover has a name. The girl meets the Chinese lover on a ferry, seeing him in a limousine while she is returning to boarding school in Saigon. She is wearing a flat brimmed fedora hat, a silk dress turned sepia-toned with age, and gold lame high heels. She is a girl who is accustomed to people looking at her. "People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old white girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother's men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis."
Each is a starkly drawn character acting in ways that seem predestined. The Chinese lover does not intend to marry her, only to be her lover. The girl surrenders to what seems her fate. "She agreed to come as soon as he asked her the previous evening. She's where she has to be, placed here. She feels a tinge of fear. It's as if this must be not only what she expects, but also what had to happen especially to her. She says, I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you usually do with women."
It is a deeply moving erotic tale. It is also a tale of the girl's troubled life, of her strained relationships with her mother and her two brothers, and the way those relationships color her affair. Her mother speaks of "blatant prostitution and laughs at the scandal." And in her elder brother's presence, the Chinese man "ceases to be [her] lover." "He doesn't cease to exist, but he's no longer anything to me. He becomes a burnt-out shell."
Written in one short paragraph after another, moving back and forth in time, ever changing its narrative locus, "The Lover" paints a fictional world of eroticism, longing and memory. The result is a compelling work of fiction, nothing less than a minor masterpiece of Twentieth century French literature.

This is a luscious, sexy book about a young woman's first real love affair, and the sensuality of every moment experienced with the intensity of youth. It is also autobiographical, and the author includes the story of her dysfunctional family, headed by a mother who is stranded abroad as a not-so-priviledged expat. It is the story of the young Marguerite Duras and the sensual inspiration that illuminated her. It is also about the many social disadvantages she grew up with, and the graceful way she shed them to become a writer of international stature, and write sentences that, in her words, are like "ribbons of sheer luminosity."

THE LOVER by Marguerite Duras, which was an international best seller and winner of the Prix Goncourt in France, tells the story of a young French girl growing up in Indochina in the 1930s and her affair with the son of a Chinese millionaire. She does not love him and his father refuses to allow them to stay together because she is white, but, to me, the love story, while serving as the reason for the story, is not the central focus. More riveting, I found was the emotional violence of the narrator's family life and the style in which it is written.

The book is written expertly and experimentally in a way that moves like a recollecting mind among ideas, images and themes. At first this is disorienting to the reader, but it begins to feel very natural very quickly, because I think the style effectively mimics the way the mind flows back over our past. Duras wrote the reputedly semi-autobiographical book over four months in 1984 when she was nearly seventy years old.

The passages on the life of her family are tragic and, as I said, emotionally very violent. The nameless French narrator grows up with a poor mother who is a school mistress in Indochina and her two brothers. The elder brother seems to be incredibly self involved and coddled by their mother, but the younger siblings are afraid of him. Duras recounts his actions with a distance that makes his behaviors more frightening, and he emerges as a central force of the book.

The small book, a little over 100 pages, is hard to forget. It so well mimics the process of the mind, it begins to feel as if it is one's own memories, mined from all the connections thoughts seek to make when we look back to a time long past that won't let us go.

There is such a deficit of good modern European novels written by women. Marguerite Duras stands out as one of the best. This short, autobiographical novel tells the story of a girl living in French Indochina and her affair with a wealthy Chinese man. However, what makes this novel so great is not the story but the way it is told. Duras' prose is lyrical and shifts from the first to the third person, moving in and out of her childhood years to her adult self reflecting on the past. Many passages made me shiver with their poetic beauty, and the end is profoundly sad.
Duras meditates on love, death, and her complex relationship with her mother and brothers. Her tangled and often brutally ugly familial relationships should strike a chord with any reader. What I found perhaps most thought-provoking were the passages on being a writer; Duras writes, "Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded inot one thorugh some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing by advertisement." If this is indeed the definition of writing, than Duras is certainly a true writer.

Duras is a master of understated romantic eroticism. This book is beautiful - but you don't know it's beautiful until the book leaves you like a lover. The writing appears simple, but the emotion isn't. It's charged with lexical magnetism.

A little book, barely 100 pages, packed with so much emotion and imagery i don't even know how to describe it. It is intense, in a way i haven't read in a while. Technically it is a story of a very poor French teenager, in Vietnam in the 1920's, who takes as her lover a wealthy Chinese man. Character-wise, he doesn't seem much more than a boy himself, though he is in his late 20's. But we get so much more information about the girl's life than we do about her affair. We hear about her mother, essentially a crazy woman, about both her brothers and their lives and deaths. The girl, who never gives her name, is weirdly detached from everyone but seems to be able to understand people deeply. The descriptions are lush and exotic. It seems to be a novel full of yearning and need.

This controversial book presents a beautiful coming of age story in which a young French girl and a Chinese aristrocrat have an affair in French Indochina. Beyond a story of love and sex, this tale exquisitely depicts the development of a teenage girl during the most formative time of her life.
As Duras usually does in her novels, the story presented is semi-autobiographical, focusing on all of the conflicts of the character's life - from family drama with her brothers to being an outcast at school.
What touched me most about this book was not the love the girl had for her Chinese lover, but the capicity she had to love others in her life - specifically her younger brother and best schoolfriend. Even more touching is that Duras held these memories close to her throughout her life, and as an old woman was still deeply effected by eventually losing those she loved - both emotionally and physically.
Any review of this book that does not mention the talent Duras has for prose would do it a great injustice. Although a small amount of the beauty is lost in the translation into English, much of Duras' poetic yet succinct word play remains in tact.

The Lover is DROP DEAD GORGEAUS. This novel is an emotional masterpiece that is a true story. The North China Lover is another book by Marguerite Duras and is also based on that ravishing affair. There was a dazzling motion picture of this novel that is masterful and I have never seen a film in my life that adapted a novel so well because in the exact same words and what the characters did were just outstanding on the silver screen. In the film the characters were the young Marguerite profoundly played by Jane March (who looks exactly like Marguerite Duras) and the man from cholon china passionately played by Tony Leung. The Lover is the best book ever, The best film ever, and the best soundtrack ever by Gabriel Yared which is beautiful and is outstanding for the book and the movie. This SUPERIOR MASTERPIECE by Marguerite Duras is about the intense,the passionate,the unforgettable, the haunting,and deeply forbidden affair between a poor fifteen year old french girl with serious problems back at her home in Sadec Vietnam and a wealthy engaged older chinese man in prewar Indochina. Duras' writing is so deep she paints the pictures of the intense, perfectly (and passionately) explicit and torridly scandelous experiances of the real lovers that are like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. This is a stunningly touching achievement that captures and embraces the incredible essence in sexual awakening,human love, and the deepest passion we all have inside. The Lover is like our deepest most intense fantasy put into words and it makes you feel much better because this happened. Anyone who is looking for a deeply erotic, melodramatic,amazing,sensously mesmerizing, and gripping story of mature love and sensual desire combined with continuously over the top writing it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.

The Lover is DROP DEAD GORGEAUS. This novel is an emotional masterpiece that is a true story. The North China Lover is another book by Marguerite Duras and is also based on that ravishing affair. There was a dazzling motion picture of this novel that is masterful and I have never seen a film in my life that adapted a novel so well because in the exact same words and what the characters did were just outstanding on the silver screen. In the film the characters were the young Marguerite profoundly played by Jane March (who looks exactly like Marguerite Duras) and the man from cholon china passionately played by Tony Leung. The Lover is the best book ever, The best film ever, and the best soundtrack ever by Gabriel Yared which is beautiful and is outstanding for the book and the movie. This SUPERIOR MASTERPIECE by Marguerite Duras is about the intense,the passionate,the unforgettable, the haunting,and deeply forbidden affair between a poor fifteen year old french girl with serious problems back at her home in Sadec Vietnam and a wealthy engaged older chinese man in prewar Indochina. Duras' writing is so deep she paints the pictures of the intense, perfectly (and passionately) explicit and torridly scandelous experiances of the real lovers that are like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. This is a stunningly touching achievement that captures and embraces the incredible essence in sexual awakening,human love, and the deepest passion we all have inside. The Lover is like our deepest most intense fantasy put into words and it makes you feel much better because this happened. Anyone who is looking for a deeply erotic, melodramatic,amazing,sensously mesmerizing, and gripping story of mature love and sensual desire combined with continuously over the top writing it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.

The Lover is DROP DEAD GORGEAUS. This novel is an emotional masterpiece that is a true story. The North China Lover is another book by Marguerite Duras and is also based on that ravishing affair. There was a dazzling motion picture of this novel that is masterful and I have never seen a film in my life that adapted a novel so well because in the exact same words and what the characters did were just outstanding on the silver screen. In the film the characters were the young Marguerite profoundly played by Jane March (who looks exactly like Marguerite Duras) and the man from cholon china passionately played by Tony Leung. The Lover is the best book ever, The best film ever, and the best soundtrack ever by Gabriel Yared which is beautiful and is outstanding for the book and the movie. This SUPERIOR MASTERPIECE by Marguerite Duras is about the intense,the passionate,the unforgettable, the haunting,and deeply forbidden affair between a poor fifteen year old french girl with serious problems back at her home in Sadec Vietnam and a wealthy engaged older chinese man in prewar Indochina. Duras' writing is so deep she paints the pictures of the intense, perfectly (and passionately) explicit and torridly scandelous experiances of the real lovers that are like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. This is a stunningly touching achievement that captures and embraces the incredible essence in sexual awakening,human love, and the deepest passion we all have inside. The Lover is like our deepest most intense fantasy put into words and it makes you feel much better because this happened. Anyone who is looking for a deeply erotic, melodramatic,amazing,sensously mesmerizing, and gripping story of mature love and sensual desire combined with continuously over the top writing it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.

The Lover is DROP DEAD GORGEAUS. This novel is an emotional masterpiece that is a true story. The North China Lover is another book by Marguerite Duras and is also based on that ravishing affair. There was a dazzling motion picture of this novel that is masterful and I have never seen a film in my life that adapted a novel so well because in the exact same words and what the characters did were just outstanding on the silver screen. In the film the characters were the young Marguerite profoundly played by Jane March (who looks exactly like Marguerite Duras) and the man from cholon china passionately played by Tony Leung. The Lover is the best book ever, The best film ever, and the best soundtrack ever by Gabriel Yared which is beautiful and is outstanding for the book and the movie. This SUPERIOR MASTERPIECE by Marguerite Duras is about the intense,the passionate,the unforgettable, the haunting,and deeply forbidden affair between a poor fifteen year old french girl with serious problems back at her home in Sadec Vietnam and a wealthy engaged older chinese man in prewar Indochina. Duras' writing is so deep she paints the pictures of the intense, perfectly (and passionately) explicit and torridly scandelous experiances of the real lovers that are like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. This is a stunningly touching achievement that captures and embraces the incredible essence in sexual awakening,human love, and the deepest passion we all have inside. The Lover is like our deepest most intense fantasy put into words and it makes you feel much better because this happened. Anyone who is looking for a deeply erotic, melodramatic,amazing,sensously mesmerizing, and gripping story of mature love and sensual desire combined with continuously over the top writing it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.

A fine work of prose-Duras constructs an impressionistic work about a French girl growing up too fast in Vietnam. Broken and destitute, the narrator grows to fall in love with a Chinese man, as her mother is forced to incessantly handle the problems of her older brother. Duras moves seamlessly moves from first to third person in the web of her prose. This is a book devoted to the act of memory and the emergence of sexuality-it is both autobiographical and yet distant-and it casts a luminous, though faint glow.

The Lover is, first and formost, a tragedy of two lovers destined to part. Marguerite Duras has created a world in which love, in many forms, is still found (if only briefly) in the face of ever-present impossibilty. While arguably semi-autobiographical, the real charm of this book is its grittiness and willingness to present a world in which people can and do make choices that they know will only lead to ruin and disappointment, and still live with the consequences.
Duras' narrator, an unnamed woman reflecting back on her coming of age in Saigon, shares her life in a frank yet touching way. The depth of thought and feeling the character portrays lends a sense of reality. Does she love the man from Chalong? Is this just prostitution? Is she driven by poverty and desperation, or is she seeking an escape from the horrors at home? I suspect even Duras was unsure, and this fallability of her narrator is what makes her so real and engaging.
The passion of the lovers, featured so prominently in the erotic loves scenes of the film adaptation, are far more subtle in the novel. There are no cheap thrills here, and those looking for wild descriptions of who does what to whom are bound to be disappointed. This is no Harliquin romance. Perhaps the most sexually explicit description is not of the heroine's time with the man from Cholong but of her fantasies about her friend Helen. These fantasies inform us of the nature of her sexual relationship with her Chinese lover more than any other memory. they also highlight the young girl's search for compassion and love that has been missing from her life to this point.
The life of Duras' lovers offers an interesting allegory to the decline of the French Indochinoise colonies. Its clear that the best days of the empire have past, the power of the 'natives' and the Chinese in Saigon is increasing, and the Second World War looms large on the horizon. Like Duras' young girl, the French relationship with 'exotic' Asia is doomed to failure. The descriptions of Cholong, the Mekong Delta and Cambodia are clear and recognizable even to modern visitors, and will surely interest those who have been there themselves.
Some readers may be disappointed that there is no happy ending for this book. Love stories are most often about hope. These lovers, however, have other things to share with us. This is a wonderful book and a refreshingly honest portrayal of love.

This book, written in a sparse style, is a recollection of Ms. Duras, her affair, her family, her environs in French Indochina during the late '20's and early '30's. Although it does bounce "back and forth," her style challenges you to "keep up." She is a thinker, this young girl. I encourage you to give this a read (get it at a good price) and see for yourself. It seems that the best stories are our own...Ms. Duras had quite a story to tell! Five stars!

P.S., If you haven't seen the movie, get a copy! The cinematography is the best I've seen in a foreign file - first rate!

We read this for a literature-writing class at NYU to study a different style of writing. I'm evaluating it on my enjoyment of reading it for plot etc., not on writing style. Although it was beautifully written, the story of a 15-year-old girl in Viet Nam who takes an older lover who is 27, I didn't find compelling. It lacked a certain warmth. It did provide a window into that time period. Duras, the author, wrote it in 1984 when she was 70. It won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. She said it was completely autobiographical. If you like atmospheric novels based upon recollections and memories, this may be a 5-star read for you.

The present review discusses the French girl's transgressive body which deconstructs and undermines the patriarchal machination in Marguerite Duras¡¦ The Lover and The North China Lover. In these two complementary autobiographical novels, Marguerite Duras relates her first sexual experience when she was only fifteen years old. In the novels, the French girl expresses her so-called first erotic orgasm experience with a Chinese lover. Her sexual drive does not come from love but from a woman¡¦s awakening. In the patriarchal society, women¡¦s sexuality has always been well controlled by men; the French girl¡¦s eagerness to get excessive sexual jouissance poses a threat to the patriarchal machination. The patriarchal ideology is omnipresent. We can find this male-centered ideology exists in the education, principle, rules, works, media, arts, literature, activities, and religion. Not only men, but also women internalize the masculine opinion that women are inferior to men in the androcentric society and have become conspirators of the patriarchal structurality; however, women still live according to the patriarchal rules without doubt. So far as the European colonialist is concerned, the biblical theology and ethics which are developed under the conditions of patriarchy have been the products of males. Many people read the Bible, learn of the biblical miracles, and act according to biblical rules without questioning the adequacy of its content. In fact, if we analyze the Bible and compare and contrast the biblical stories and commandments, we will find that the Bible is not such a righteous Gospel as we think. Especially, there are too many conflicts, taboos, and unfair rules which have constrained women and caused a dilemma for females for the past two thousand years. In The Lover and The North China Lover, the French girl uses her sexuality to express and exalt her own transcendent power. Her transgressive body totally betrays a nostalgia for a female Eden and breaks the norms of the biblical sexual limits. We can say the French girl is an advocate avant garde of the modern feminists who defies this patriarchal machination successfully.

Marguerite Duras has written, in retrospect, the hypnotic story of her odd relationship with the adult son of a Chinese millionnaire at least 15 yrs her senior. Written as a novel, there's no doubt it's Duras' own tale of her love affair when she was just a 15yo in Indochina in the 30s, one of three children of a disturbed and impoverished English widow who was trying to make ends meet as a teacher. Her daughter, Duras, was left mostly to fend for herself at a boarding school that was unusually permissive with the odd comings and goings of this precocious child-woman.
Duras tells this story from the distance of years, through a technique of oblique references, forgettings, reiteration, repetition (the straw hat, the dress, the shoes...), fractured images, and readers get the sense of coming at what happened reluctantly, as tho the author is a little unwilling to share everything with us.
It's a mesmerizing, seductive, atmospheric, overlapping, strangely detached story - one that readers will not soon forget.

Duras' writing style is undisputably one of the world's finest in this century. Just simple words with creative construction, usage and presentation of sentences. They are so simple, yet layered with so much invisible and indescribable feelings, no words as of today could describe what you'd feel as you're going through the book. Never was there any other writer who could describe and emote with so much sensitivity and beauty. Though "The Lover" is morbid, the struggling innocence of life is so heartbreaking, you can't help but weep without tears as you turn the pages, especially the last few. She has created characters and written a story very unique in emotions and thoughts. She has capably used the characters of the girl and her family as well as the Chinese, to enter deep into our souls, bring out our most hidden feelings, unknown to ourselves, and open us to an entirely different perspective. Such soul-searching is probably something we could never have t! he ability to do, perhaps not even in this lifetime.

A curiosity of between a fiction and a true story makes me read this book. I really like "the Lover", it's one of my favorite book to recommand others, even though I don't like much Duras.
The writing is so short, like pieces of puzzle, there is no order to explain. Duras wrote what she felt, thought spontaneously in a paragragh after another. This book is descriptive and the flow of feelings is so delicate. Especially, the reflections about the life that Duras explained in this story, are truly profound and even sorrowful for me.
There is no tension, no exposed conflict, the story moves so still like the calm ocean. The tranquility in rich thoughtful description, that's why I like this novel.

Duras must be a complicated character if we are to believe that this a real reflection of her childhood. It is disturbing and original, almost unbelievable, confronting racism,paedophilia and incest.Yet the lateness of arrival of this piece in relation to Duras's career and life, contradicts her audacious and honest manner of conveying these subversive issues in the text, does her exotic past embarass or pain her more than she wants the reader to think? And is this why she chooses to be so vague with time, date , order of events and place. The dysfunctionality of her upbringing is parodied by the lack of structure and disjointed writing style of this novel, this makes it both convincing and unconvincing as an autobiography, a genre which relies heavily on the correctness of facts and chronological order. Do not attempt to read this book without being prepared for an insight into a mind, not a life.

This is one of the most beautifully written pieces of art! The story is very personal but it is the execution which is exquisite, and makes the story so. More impressionistic than the more detailed North China Lover, which was written after the success of The Lover, it is also more evocative. Very unique writing style.

The prose is stark at times, making this classic all the more intriguing. The narrator seems at once affected and numb, young but not naive. It is said to be a slice of the actual author's life, and certainly it seems to have been written from a place of truth and pain. The movie differs greatly from the book and is enjoyable as its own entity, but if you liked the film, read the original -- much more affecting.

What a delicious little book full of perfect sentences.(Outstanding begining) Impresive lirisms impregnates de hole of the book as much as a hang over. After days of alcohol, with a disturbed brain, Duras built this incredible monument to the me myshelf. She has a pefect style, perfect sentence, hard sharp brain, cruelity, aloofness, pride, arrogance and tenderness (Helene Lagonelle)
I will surely recommended and always advice toread in french.

Absolutely loved this book! Finished it in one read. Truly timeless classic. Love that lasts for a life time, something that is truly beautiful. Great example where love springs in the most unexpected of places.

I absolutely loved the style of Duras prose. It is top of the line, even translated. The plot however leaves much to be desired. Duras plays with events non-chronologically, telling you things early on which would best be saved for the end of the novel. If you're looking for something different, this book might be for you. If not, leave it alone. You'll be glad you did.