Book Description
An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt,
The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984.
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 spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.
Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of
The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective--that of a visitor to Vietnam today.
Customer Reviews:
Sumptuous story.......2007-09-25
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.
This one's artistic........2007-06-22
After watching the movie, I just had to read the book. Some say, the book is always better than the movie, in this case though both book and movie are beautiful, but each in their own way.
The book draws so much more depth and power (which is of course only hinted in the movie). It is written with a foreign musicality to it. Sentences are structured in ways that communicate the main character's unusual background--a French girl living in prewar Indochina. The way it's structured takes the reader into the poetic, romantic and exotic mind of the narrator.
This is more literary, experimental (sure) and if you're looking for a romance novel, this ain't it. This one's artistic.
Lost and lonely in colonial life.......2007-05-25
This is a novel about two lonely people - but obviously it's autobiographical, about an intense love affair between a quietly assertive 15 year-old and a Chinese man twice her age. The characters are weary, weeping, exhausted by the heat, by the failure of their dreams. The lovers are beautiful and erotic, but to me the most powerful and intense character is the girl's mother - determined, sad, loving and fiercely loved. I also loved the descriptions of the river, flowing on uncaring. The oppressive heat overwhelms and weakens the characters. The story has the atmosphere of a Graham Greene novel, without the politics. I have never seen the movie, but fear it may be soft porn.
Meandering and Confusing.......2007-03-16
I am not sure where the adulation for this book comes from and I realize I am in the minority in not liking it. I found this book very difficult to follow and the ceaseless jumping about from time to time was annoying. There was also a surprising amount of repetition in this short book. I really wanted to like this book. It might be better with a second read but life is too short for that.
Insightful memoir.......2007-01-12
It was interesting to see the parallels between Duras' life and the life of the narrator. The style (nouveau roman) might be difficult for some readers to follow, but the recalling of memories comes across as bittersweet and ultimately painful...makes for an interesting study.
Average customer rating:
- Incroyable
- Pure Art
- Beyond the confines of time & space - utterly haunting.
- The best book I've ever read
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L'Amant (Minuit)
Marguerite Duras
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ASIN: 2707306959 |
Customer Reviews:
Incroyable.......2004-11-21
With such intimate tone Marguerite Duras involves us in the story of her childhood. She, daughter of a poor French family in the colonies (South East Asia) has her first romantic experience with a rich Chinese man.
Class, gender, ethnicity, uprootedness, relationships, all of that mingles to create a narrative that flows full of power and feeling. Both the nameless narratrice and her lover are outsiders in a country that is not really theirs, both share a moment and both have complex lives.
I think anyone who has grown in a home full of conflicts and privations can easily identify with the feelings so passionately set to paper by the author. And anyone else can, too: such is the magic of her prose.
The Éditions de Minuit series is rather minimalistic: no prologue, no notes. None are needed.
Pure Art.......2003-10-29
This autobiographical novel is pure art. I read it in French first, but the translation loses nothing of the suspended breath of emotion so often found in French literature. There is nothing overwritten in the prose nor overstated in the story. The tale of a girl's forbidden passion is breathtaking in its simplicity and poignant in its retelling by the woman now grown old.--Sophie Simonet, ACT OF LOVE, romantic suspense novel (Fictionwise)
Beyond the confines of time & space - utterly haunting........2000-02-08
This is one of those books which captures your total attention and you will never forget it. There is no way to describe it. Beyond the confines of time and space is the only way I can explain it, utterly haunting. It is as if the author is sitting with you, telling you her tale, and you're suspended in a sort of entranced state, not able to cry, not able to smile, not able to rationalize. It's hypnotic. Based on Duras' early life, you can hardly believe this tale to be true. Do people feel such emotions? Could there be a love so strange and haunting as this? Certainly, while I do not believe in some of her viewpoints, I cannot ignore the ingeniousness of her web-weaving tale. You can see this "drifter", waif of a girl wearing the man's fedora, pressing her lips against the glass of the window, you can see her, as an older woman with a "face laid waste" as her lost love confesses that he still loves her and will never stop loving her. In between the illusions of time and space, her memory remains vivid, lucid, yet with a sort of spiritual calm about it. The sort of calm that comes from having overcome the most profound pain. This work is pure genius, I cannot imagine why Americans have not caught onto it.
The best book I've ever read.......1999-11-10
It's the greatest book and author of this century. It revealed the feeling burried in our hearts for long. It touched our soul by simple words. Each page turned over with the "weep without tears". The picture Marguerite tried to show us is a motionless photo which has been wanned by the history. The story happened in the colonial period again tells us a way to chase for the real love and freeze the love into our mirror.
Book Description
Long acknowledged as one of the most important literary figures in France, Marguerite Duras has garnered worldwide praise for her work, from the acclaimed screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour to the best-selling novel The Lover. In this volume of four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few central characters: from the park bench couple in The Square (1955) to the double love triangle in Ten-thirty on a Summer Night (1960), each novel probes the depths of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.
Customer Reviews:
Save The Lover for later; start with the novellas........2006-04-15
Duras seems like the Simone Weil of fiction: her characters philosophize while they get undressed and into bed. While Duras covers the same material (man, woman, love, deceit) at least these are fine subjects in the hands of a master crafter. I don't think we can hold it against her for writing them over and over.
10:30 on a Summer Night........2006-02-21
Once again the holidays are here. Once again the highways of summer. Once again churches to be visited. Once again 10:30 in the evening. Paintings by Goya you have to see.Storms. Nights without sleep. And the summer heat.
However, a crime takes place that could change the course of the holidays. But when all things are said and done, what could change the course of the holidays?
This short novella is one of the best writings by Duras. The way a short (and dangerous) romance is described could only have been done by her.
A Good Introduction to Duras.......2003-02-23
"10:30 on a Summer Night" is by far the best of the four novels in this book, focusing on murder and infidelity during a vacation outside Madrid. "Moderato Cantible" is good but not as intriguing as "10:30 on a Summer Night" and is about an alcoholic mother developing an odd relationship with a stranger in a café on the way home from her son's piano lesson. "The Square" has some good lines but is generally slow, focusing solely on a salesman and a servant talking in the park.
beautiful.......2002-05-10
The first story ("The Square")is a bit tedious (or maybe the significance was over my head). It's composed almost entirely of dialogue between two strangers who meet in a park and discuss their rather pitiful lives. But the three final stories are truly beautiful. The language is so vivid that even reading the stories on a cold Minnesota night I felt the urge to mop sweat from my brow. The third story, "10:30 on a Summer Night," in which a woman watches the sexual attraction develop between her husband and best friend, is incredibly poignant.
I don't get it.......2001-05-02
Two of my closest, most intellectual/cultural-elite type friends have raved about Marguerite Duras. So I read "The Lover." Great story. Okay...they tell me "Moderato Cantabile" is her masterpiece. I search for an English translation, find this foursome. Terrific, I think, I can explore even more. I must ask the reviewers of this work...Have you read it all together???? Every story is the same, folks! This woman had one, maybe two stories (okay, Hiroshima Mon Amour makes three) in her blood. Take an alcoholic woman with a hidden sexual agenda, throw in an unfaithful (substitute uptight/unattentive, etc) husband...or father (oh yeah, don't forget the incest angle), then place them all in some tedious, drawn-out situation (aftermath of a murder investigation, waiting for a construction contracter, a storm, an afternoon on a park bench), then let them TALK. And talk. And talk. Get it? I may not be the super intellectual, cultural elite type, but I know pretension when I read it. Skip Duras. Or...better...read "The Lover," pretend you know all about her, and watch the others at a party try to impress you.
Average customer rating:
- A beautiful book
- literary testament/memoir explaining Duras's theory of writ
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Writing
Marguerite Duras
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Book Description
Marquerite Duras's theory of literature.
Customer Reviews:
A beautiful book.......2000-06-30
"Writing" combines elements of fictional narrative, literary theory, and conversational Q&A all in Duras's recognizable voice. It is a wonderful book allowing readers to experience both Duras's writing process and the finished outcome.
literary testament/memoir explaining Duras's theory of writ.......1998-02-27
this is the last book by Duras, as she passed away on March 4, 1996. Recommended for anyone who appreciates the spledid bareness of her late style. Her theory of writing, why she wrote, and what compells writers...fascinating, and reads like a meditation.
Book Description
A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.
Customer Reviews:
Small book with a large impact.......2007-01-10
This book is great to read again and again and still find new meanings and personal understandings each time. It is deceptively light - and the rich meanings underneath the words could easily be missed because of the style in delivery. A Beautiful piece of truth and human poetry.
hmmm.....?.......2006-07-25
not as accessible as some of her other work... it is in some ways connected to "blue eyes, black hair" which you might like to read first....
powerful stuff, if a bit ... hard to get into at times, but as always the writing is beautiful.
Marguerite Duras's Malady of Death.......2005-07-31
In Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras examines the inner life of a man who has never experienced love for another human being. Through Duras's wonderfully spare syntax, the reader lives through the man's frustration, emptiness, rage and violent impulses. Wanting to know what it is like to love someone, the man pays a young woman to shut herself away with him in a single room of his house and submit to him completely. The young woman is a good sport and does what she has contracted to do without complaint. Through her few questions and comments, the nature of the man's problem is revealed. He has the malady of death and is a strange, alien being, both unloving and unlovable.
Marguerite Duras wrote this work as an artistic response to her relationship with a gay man who was her companion for the last sixteen years of her life. She extensively re-worked Malady of Death, which is actually a short story that can be played out onstage, into a novella/playscript entitled Blue Eyes, Black Hair. The longer version dwells on the emotional and physical emptiness of both the man and the woman. Both works describe unrelenting hopelessness and unmitigated despair. Ironically, I found Malady of Death to be the more cohesive and artistic rendering of the theme. The expanded, re-worked treatment in Blue Eyes, Black Hair directly addresses the man's obsession and the woman's distress and has a pathos which exhausts the reader.
Although this work is, at 60 pages, very short and can be read in 20 minutes time while browsing in a bookstore, I wouldn't recommend trying to read this work at such a fast pace. Marguerite Duras's writing style is unique and at times difficult to follow. This is a work to be taken slowly and enjoyed.
Beautifully hypontic.......2005-01-14
I picked up "Malady of Death" in a bargain bin at Waldenbooks many years ago. Having heard a great deal about "The Lover," also by Duras, I decided that at a mere 60+ pages and at a ridiculously low price, there was little to lose. I found myself reading it and re-reading it. There isn't much to the story, nor is it much of one. However, this is not so much a case of what is written as much as how it is written. Duras language is extremely poetic with an ever present sense of longing and sorrow. The lyrical quality in her writing is absolutely magical. The simple story of someone paying for companionship, intimacy and, ultimately, sex because of his inability to love is hardly a groundbreaking premise, but, again, its worth and beauty lie in how it is communicated and the sensation you experience in its wake. Very beautiful, indeed.
An Intriguing Story.......2004-04-07
Hmmm. One could write a review longer than the book, it seems; I wonder if that would miss the point. I suppose one could impose a number of interpretations upon this very brief novel, but I though of it as a rather literal story. A very lonely and probably shy man pays a woman to spend several nights with him to see if he can ever love or be loved. Sadly, the answer is no. And then she is gone. His effort to exert and enforce control proves to be impotent. Even though he won't even allow her to voice her pleasure - why? - she seems to feelo only a reserved pity for him; not anger, hatred, resentment, fear, or any other emotion I would expect a woman in her position to feel. Such is his own powerlessness, his malady of death. This is an excellent book which, yes, can be read in the book store without spending any money. Shame on you for doing that, and not supporting such inquisitive literature, and giving yourself the opportunity to re-read and study the text.
Average customer rating:
- Technically brilliant
- Another good book by Duras about an alcoholic in a café
- this is a test
- A musical masterpiece of a book
- Beautifully haunting
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Moderato Cantabile (Minuit "Double")
Marguerite Duras
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ASIN: 2707303143 |
Customer Reviews:
Technically brilliant.......2006-03-17
This novelette (~58 pages) is one of the most technically perfect pieces of fiction I have ever encountered. The "plot" is fairly conventional (but in many ways is inconsequential to the textual developments). The amount of detail hidden away in the narrative structure is incredible and the construction and crafting are about as perfect as could be desired. The story is interesting on so many levels that repetitive readings continue to illuminate and expand understanding.
Consider how Duras plays with objectivity in the first central theme of the novel. After the first reading you'll conclude that a man murdered a woman in a cafe--presumably by shooting her through the heart upon her own request. And yet a closer reading reveals the problems with this assumption: a scream is heard, but no gunshot; blood comes from the victim's mouth, but not her heart; nobody (notably including the primary characters) actually witnessed anything; the man's behavior is unindicative of definitive guilt--perhaps he's simply distraught; the woman was the man's wife (we are told as one of the only "omniscient" acts of the unknown narrator)--but later an acquaintance notes that the woman "was married". In short, even the objective "murder" presented is anything but objective.
Instead of reading a story you will end up inventing a plausible reality--just as Anne and Chauvin (the primary characters) invent a plausible reality to explain their unsatisfied (and unsatisfiable) desire.
Ever wonder why Anne ignores the closest end-of-work-day siren but pays attention to the farthest-away end-of-work-day siren? Remember that her husband manages a factory. Remember that her husband's factory is the furthest away from the cafe, on the opposite side of town of her house. Remember that she has to beat her husband home from work. Details like this abound, but of course are left to a careful reader to pick them out and assemble them into a larger understanding.
Such a beautiful novelette--so well crafted, so enjoyable to read and re-read. Thoroughly recommended. Fiction as it was meant to be.
Another good book by Duras about an alcoholic in a café.......2003-02-23
Similar in some ways to "10:30 on a Summer Night," this book is about an alcoholic woman taking her son to piano lessons and on the way home she develops an odd relationship with a stranger in a café where a man has just killed his lover. As with many of Duras' books, one shouldn't expect to the affair to culminate in physical love or if it does, it probably won't be particulary pleasant or satisfying. For those looking for a realistic story where things don't necessarily go right, I recommend this book along with "10:30 on a Summer Night," also written by Duras.
this is a test.......2001-02-08
I sent in a review relating this book to music but not sure if i did it under my account name or not?
A musical masterpiece of a book.......2001-02-08
Considered a "musical novel" and better than Virgina Wolf's "The Waves" (though "The Waves" is quite incredible in its own right and should not be over looked). If you are not famillar with the genuis of a musical novel the idea is incredible. It brings upon an interesting form for exploring the duality of human experience. "Moderato Cantabile", follows the form of the first movement of a sonata, presenting and developing in two contrasting themes in different keys. "Moderato" the word it self indicating a measure of control taken with the time signaure of a sonata being a square four-four outlines the meter the book follows. Anne's (the main character) life in the first theme starts out structured and boring. In the second chapter she begins her strange affair with Chauvin. Chauvin, or the the second theme is Ann's quest for the "cantabile" (the lyrical impulse, or exit from the first theme of boredom). They meet again and again, at the same bar and always at the same time of day, unitl the eighth chapter. Then, just as the eighth note of a musical scale is the same as the first (but an octave higher) the final resolution comes in the form of a symbolic reenactment of the murder that occurs at the end of the first chapter: Chauvin: "I wish you were dead." Anne: "I already am." --And Anne returns permanently to her boring life.
Brillantly written and a must have in any book collection.
Beautifully haunting.......1999-11-07
In this story, seeing the aftermath of a murder sends a respectable matron spiralling into the darkness within herself. Married, though curiously husbandless, Anne Debardes engages in brutally sexualized conversation with a stranger whom she can't bear to touch. They love each other, but cannot live with that knowledge.
Amazon.com
Hailed in France as "an incomparable pleasure," Marguerite Duras's 1991 novel is a spare, beautiful retelling of the dramatic experiences of her own adolescence. More daring and truthful than any book she wrote previously -- including The Lover, it emphasizes the realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed.
Book Description
An elegant new paperback edition of one of Marguerite Duras's most important books.
Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras's adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary. Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is "so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it...lingers like a strong perfume" (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to "the Duras of the great books and the great days," it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author's life.
Customer Reviews:
fabulous.......2006-07-25
this is like a writers version of a directors cut of "the lover"...
if you loved the lover then you will love this :)
it fills in a lot of details that were not included in "The lover"...
answers some of the questions you might have been asking about "the lover"...
Marguerite Duras elobrates even further with this Novel!.......2006-01-17
I read this book because I love the movie. Marguerite Duras's novel is a fascinating retelling of the domestic experiences of her adolescence that have shaped her work. This book is far more daring and truthful, it emphasizes the tough realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed. This book both shock and entrance me. It's initially written as notes towards a film script for the "The Lover"; the book has grainy, film tic qualities of a documentary. Gone are the romantic and nostalgic readings of the past.
Here are the humiliations and passions of the poverty-ridden world in which Duras grew up: the intense sexuality of the young woman who was her friends and classmates, a group of adolescents impatient for the experiences of adulthood while still caught up in the conflicts of childhood. From one book to another, the lover has changed by counting his bankroll in front of the destitute whites, the older brother ready to kill for his drugs, the younger brother is transformed, the "child", and herself express differently with her stubborn desire and her pain.
Neither her worldly success nor the fuss about the "The Lover" have caused this novelist to deviate an inch from her desire to tell all, about the freshness of desire, the violence of loving, which makes us understand the work. Everything is here, immediate, sensual. "The North China Lover is a brilliant book that is both stunning and diabolical. Highly recommended.
A must read for someone who has watch 'The lover'.......2005-10-09
This is the first time I've read Marguerite Duras' book and I love her style of writting - superb, beautifully written and her usage of words. The translator get some credit of it - though I cannot compare since I dont know french.
If you have watch the movie, 'The lover', this book is must read. Many of the feeling, reaction .. just cannot be portrait enough in the movie.
From the starting of this book where the child met with the chinese man, it moves me deeply, in knowing their passions, their suffering and their seperation - far much than express in the movie as we will have a much broader idea.
I am not indicating that the movie is bad; it isnt at all. But, it is through this book that, the author has bring you into their capturing world, as if, you were there; you feel their pain and their love affairs.
An Important Addition.......2003-01-29
Considerable addition to "The Lover", actually much better. Her notes which include her ideas as to how the book should be filmed are particuarily fascinating.
A Compelling Novel of Memory and Eroticism.......2002-05-02
In 1984, Marguerite Duras won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, for her short novel, "The Lover". That novel told the simple story of an adolescent French girl living in Vietnam in the 1930s. She meets an older Chinese man who becomes her lover. It is a sparely written novel, shifting in time and narrative perspective, often difficult to follow. It is also a novel charged with memory, yearning and erotic feeling.
"The North China Lover", written several years later and published in an English edition in 1992, is a kind of extension of the earlier novel, written with much more detail, inhabiting the interstices of "The Lover". Like its precursor, "The North China Lover" tells a powerful tale of love between the twenty-seven year old Chinese man and the barely teen-aged girl whom he meets on a ferry crossing the Mekong River. Once again, neither the Chinese man nor the girl has a name. However, unlike the earlier novel, many of the other characters are identified and the narrative of "The North China Lover" is considerably more detailed. Originally written as notes for a screenplay of "The Lover", the narrative of "The North China Lover" is episodic, described by one reviewer as having the "grainy, filmic qualities of a documentary." It is also more linear in its story line, easier to follow than the earlier novel, but still characterized by the nouveau roman influences that permeate Marguerite Duras' writing.
"The North China Lover", like its precursor, is a compelling work of memory, eroticism and yearning that, in true Duras style, conflates literary imagination and biography. Read it slowly, languorously savor its eroticism, and let it linger in your mind long after you've closed the book.
Book Description
Unseen voices narrate this story of the affair between the haunting Anne-Marie Stretter and the disgraced French vice-consul in Lahore. In the India of 1937, with the smell of laurels and leprosy permeating the air, the characters perform a dance of doomed love to the strains of a dying colonialism.
Average customer rating:
- Struggles of Colonial life in French IndoChina
- The Sea Wall
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The Sea Wall
Marguerite Duras
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The Lover
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India Song
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ASIN: 0060970537 |
Customer Reviews:
Struggles of Colonial life in French IndoChina.......2001-03-07
Duras wrote this novel right in the middle of France's struggle with the war of independence in Indochina. That is where this novel takes place. It is a compelling, well illstrated, and masterfully composed piece of writing that is actually semi-autobiographical (many events of Duras' life appear as events in the novel). It is based upon a family's constant struggle with the endless difficulties with life in the country and their many and frequent bouts with the constant desperation that is portrayed throught the entire course of the book. It is a wonderful book to read and (undoubtedly) enjoy.
The Sea Wall.......2000-10-20
The Sea Wall is a fine example of Duras' cinematic and romantic writing style. Like The Lover, this novel is semi-autobiographical, and is set in French colonial Indochine.It is the story of a poor widow's desperate fight against the world she is trapped in, exemplified by the sea wall she constructs to stop the yearly encroachment of the sea on her useless concession of land. Although her efforts are futile, she bravely, or sometimes absurdly, maintains hope in the midst of poverty and her children's growing restlessness.
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