The Lover

Rating:
Summary: Memories elucidated
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: SUPERIOR,A PERFECT MASTERPIECE,VISUALLY STUNNING,AND SENSOUS
Review: 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 erotica it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Short, direct and shameless
Review: 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.