From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
It is said old loves can haunt us. The Lover creates this feeling through an atmosphere of shadows, veils, floating memories that came from - was it this boat trip or the last one? from age eight or twelve or thirty? In the end it doesn't matter, for the experience is now embedded, a distinct yet inseparable part of the personality. Marguerite Duras mines her own past to tell The Lover, the story of an adolescent girl growing up in Indochina during the 1930s. The girl is wayward, rebellious; one day, returning to school on the ferry, dressed in gold lame shoes, a man's hat and a silk dress, she encounters the son of a Chinese millionaire. Soon they are involved in the first affair of her life, one she claims has no basis in love for her. He can never marry her - his father has refused - and she says she will leave without regrets. But is that possible? Years later she looks back. By presenting ideas and memories in paragraphs that are literally isolated yet constantly overlapping, The Lover creates a misty world of connections made by emotion rather than logic or chronology, a feeling that lingers after the book itself is closed. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.





Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)


From the Publisher
"Powerful, authentic, completely successful...perfect."
--New York Times Book Review

"Duras manages to combine the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives of confession and objectivity, of lyrical poetry and nouveau roman. The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader's mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought--the force of a metaphysical contemplation of the paradoxes of the human heart."
--New York Times

"A vivid, lingering novel...a brilliant work of art."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"All life is here...visions of love and hate I've never read before. How can something so ethereal be so much more than real? This, I can only suppose, is the mark of literary genius."
--Fay Weldon

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Set in the pre-war Indochina of Marguerite Duras' 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Diane Johnson - New York Times Book Review

[An] authentic and completely successful work [that achieves] a felicitous and masterly balance between formalism and powerful emotional effect.

Diane Johnson

[An] authentic and completely successful work [that achieves] a felicitous and masterly balance between formalism and powerful emotional effect. -- New York Times Book Review

Boston Herald