The Lover

Rating:
Summary: Short, direct and shameless
Review: A beautiful and tersely written story of the love affair between a teenage French girl and a Chinese man in Indochina.

Rating:
Summary: A Book For Writers
Review: It's not that Duras threw away the rules, but how well she understood them and knew how to use them.

The book starts out using Historical Present Tense to create a particular feeling in the reader, and when our heroine becomes too emotionally engaged, Duras creates a feeling of withdrawl by switching from First Person to Third Person.

This is brilliance, and greatly unappreciated.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing read
Review: L'Amant is an amazing book, full of sorrow and muted passion. It swept me away, and into my own sorrow about love. I read it several times. I've read about 5 novels by Duras, out of her huge catalogue of books (40 or so?). This one is definitely my favorite.

Languid language, erotic yet not pornographic, sensual. Fully emotional yet emotionally distant at the same time.

Also, the novel is "semi-autobiographical". It chronicles the first person narrator's love affair with an older chinese man when she was just a poor young teenager. The story has been romanticized heavily from the real life story of Duras, who (I am told by a friend who studied her in depth) was prostituted by her mother to this rich chinese man in her youth. I regret I don't remember the differences between real-life and the book well now. But knowing this opened a further sadness to the story. But I suppose it was the author's way of beautifying a terrible experience she had had.

[Technically I haven't read this book, I read the original French version. But if I write this review for that edition no one will see it.]

Rating:
Summary: Experimental writing style that works to perfection
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: ummmm, what'd i miss?
Review: ok. i'm lost. i just read the book, THE LOVER, and i can't figure it out. mind you, i read a lot. at the same time i read THE LOVER i am reading pearl s. buck IMPERIAL WOMAN, and a book by barbara samuel. i am studying A COURSE IN MIRACLES and i like to study anything off the beaten track.....i read, and study, extensively. and you know what? i don't get THE LOVER. first love. ok. i had a couple of those, but i still don't relate....i am lost by the tenses...what is happening and when? then i don't understand indo-china. sorry. i don't know much more about this area of the world than what pearl is telling me in IMPERIAL WOMAN circa mid 1800's. EXLAIN PLEASE> oh, add in what i have recently researched and know about the boxing day tsumani....that is the extent of knowledge i have about this area of the world. i can't know what i haven't lived. explain it please...for example, what is the real meaning of white people in THE LOVER (rare?)? explain. what land does her mother lose and why? what is her brother, the older, all about....? the whole book i wait for clarification. i truly want to understand. so much that i ask my 16 year old daughter to read it and help me "get it"....so much that i go on amazon and read the reviews to see what other readers pulled from the book. i want to get it...what'd i miss? i spent a whole sunday afternoon on this...what was the point? i don't feel it....jf

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: Pure Art
Review: 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 or overstated in the story. The tale of a girl's forbidden passion is quite breathtaking in its simplicity and poignant in its retelling by the woman now grown old.--Sophie Simonet, ACT OF LOVE, romantic suspense novel (Fictionwise)

Rating:
Summary: long past
Review: This 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.
I also Recommended the book Sex and the perfect lover by Mabel Iam.



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.