The North China Lover

Rating:
Summary: An Important Addition
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An Important Addition
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Compelling Novel of Memory and Eroticism
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Duras once again write buried desire from hysterical body
Review: Marguerite Duras became famous and rose to international attention when she received France¡¦s most prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize in 1984 for her autobiographical work, The Lover. This autobiographical novel is about Duras¡¦ adolescence in Indochina during the late 1920s. In 1991, Duras rewrote the book and renamed it The North China Lover. Raylene Ramsay relates that this new novel is ¡§[o]ne new autobiography, Duras¡¦ 1991 L¡¦Amant de la Chine du nord ( ¡§The North China Lover¡¨ ) . . . . Duras seeks once again, stubbornly, passionately, to write intense and buried desire from her own hysterical body at once given voice by, and filtered through, a text that seeks new forms of community and economies of power and pleasure¡¨ (College Literature 50). According to Janice Morgan¡¦s point of view, ¡§Duras assumes the two different texts to be complementary, for each provides a certain content that the other leaves out¡¨ (French Review 272). From these we know that the relationship between the two novels is closely inter-dependent.

Rating:
Summary: haunting
Review: This is a haunting story. A totally objectionable storyline ( a love affair between a fourteen year old girl and a twenty something man) is fascinating here. The reader feels for the girl, whose mental age is certainly way beyond her chronological age, and for the man who suffers greatly. A beautifully told tale, very French and elusive in the telling.

Rating:
Summary: haunting
Review: This is a haunting story. A totally objectionable storyline ( a love affair between a fourteen year old girl and a twenty something man) is fascinating here. The reader feels for the girl, whose mental age is certainly way beyond her chronological age, and for the man who suffers greatly. A beautifully told tale, very French and elusive in the telling.

Rating:
Summary: youth and decay
Review: This is a wonderful re-work of her earlier novel, The Lover. Very sad, the story describes a youth, coming of age, that is set in a deteriorating colonial situation in Vietnam as well as a family in a crisis of addiction and mental illness. In the larger context, you really get a feeling for what it was like to live there then, as well as of the Asian and French colonial mentalities. In contrast to many contemporary French novels, which I usually find very difficult to understand given their willful obscurantism, while exotics the characters are very real and easy to identify with.

Recommended.