Customer Reviews

The Lover

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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.

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