The Lover [Paperback]

Margarite Duras (Author)

Book Description

Series: Flamingo S. | Publication Date: December 5, 1994

An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover in the waning days of France's colonial empire.

This edition includes an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective -- that of a visitor to Vietnam today.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marguerite Duras was one of Europe's most distinguished writers. The author of many novels and screenplays, she is perhaps best known outside France for her filmscript Hiroshima Mon Amour and her Prix Goncourt-winning novel THE LOVER, also filmed. Her other books include LA DOLEUR, BLUE EYES BLACK HAIR, SUMMER RAIN and THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. Born in Indochina in 1914, Marguerite Duras died in 1996.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks (December 5, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006541593
• ISBN-13: 978-0006541592
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #968,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short, direct and shameless, June 22, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lover (Paperback)

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.

14 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars appalling, July 13, 2002

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lover (Paperback)

Learn to read them properly. They are sacred.
-Marguerite Duras speaking of her own writing

They say masturbation makes morons of children. It wasn't the case with me. On the contrary, it brought me reason, revolt and joy.
-Marguerite Duras speaking of herself

These two quotations, which the critic Robert Fulford cites in his review of a biography of Ms Duras, provide us with some perspective on how we're supposed
to react to this semi-autobiographical novel. For the novel is itself masturbatory, an act of self-love. And only someone who considers themself to be a kind of
divine could possibly imagine that readers would find beautiful and moving the story of her own childhood whoredom.

Ms Duras seems to have been a profoundly despicable person, a collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France, then switching to the Communists just in time to
save her skin, disliked by even her "friends", and apparently filled with well-deserved self-loathing. Here she tells the altogether unpleasant tale of a 15 year
old French girl in Indochina who, her family having fallen on hard times, seduces a rich Chinese man twice her age in order to become his kept woman. It is a
love story that is devoid of love, a piece of erotica that is singularly unerotic, a coming of age tale by an author who seems to have spent in life trapped in the
self-centeredness of childhood. It. like its author, is simply appalling.

GRADE : F