The Lover

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.