Product Description
Back in print in paperback, "an exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl" ("Boston Herald"). This edition includes an Introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective--that of a visitor to Vietnam today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (61)

Say more with less.
Duras articulates so beautifully everything I feel, but cannot find the words to say.For me, this is close to perfection.The beauty in her prose lays in what is not said, in what can only be felt.

Fine story from Duras
This is an ok book, it tells the story about Duras affair as a young teenager, with an older Chinese man. During the account Duras changes between past and present tense. She also sometimes write about herself as "I" and sometimes in third person, I haven't really figured out why she makes these changes. The matarial of this book one supposes could actually be developed into a real moving novel, I don't know why Duras kept the story in this short form. Perhaps she was lazy? As it stand now it somewhat has a sketchy form, which perhaps is ok? But I think I would have prefered if she had made a longer and more elaborated novel out of the material. And those inconsistencies I mentioned in the start (about past and present tense and I account and third person) Well maybe the book would have been better without those litterary experiments?

This is a book for those who have a unrequited love
I love this book. It's not written from the movie THE LOVER 1992 but from the author'sown view of her life in Indochina as a young teen and her family and her Chinese lover. It's a beautiful love story but sad in the end.If you have a love who you could not be with in life, then you could relate to this book.It's also great to watch the movie THE LOVER which the movie was based on.Not for children or young teen because of subject matter.

interesting effort but hard to love
I didn't love The Lover, but as a fan of things Vietnamese I'm glad I read this semi-autobiographical story of Duras growing up in French Indochina. The loose, episodic narrative--about a teenage girl, her unstable family, and her older Chinese lover--requires some comfort with ambiguity as well as patience to put the pieces of the plot together. The narrator somehow manages to be emotionally overwrought and indifferent at the same time; an American reader is likely to find her exceptionally French. But to Duras' credit, The Lover is knowingly brief and often poetic; it feels something like an experimental but successful prose poem.

From Lolita's point of view ...
...well, not literally, but there certainly are parallels. This novella is set in Indochina, in the `30's, and is told, via fragments of the memory of an older woman now living in France, of her life as a precocious 15 year old, and her first sexual experiences, and perhaps, with the emphasis on the uncertainty, despite the title, of her first love. The book is light on eroticism; it is far more about the female use of sex for, if you will, "empowerment," which, in part, involves escape from an unhappy childhood situation. In gold lame high-heels and a foppish male hat, she meets her lover (or victim?), a 27 year old son of a Chinese millionaire, on a ferry as they cross the Mekong.

Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay for the movie, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," released 50 years ago. Far more so, the movie IS about love; like "The Lover," the love is trans-cultural, and each individual has experienced a significant trauma: the Japanese male was near Hiroshima, and lost family members there when the A-Bomb was dropped; she is French, and had a German officer as a lover in the village of Nevers, known for its "calme," and after the war she was ostracized as a "collabo," including having her hair shorn. "The Lover" also concerns West-East love, again, between a French woman (girl) and an Oriental male. The "trauma" each has experienced is more internalized, relating to their family. He can never be his "own man," living under the shadow of a domineering father. She lives in a very dysfunctional family, with a worthless elder brother, who keeps the family mired in poverty through his drug and gambling addictions, and a mother, from her Picardy farm, who worships him, largely neglecting the other two siblings.

For a novella, Duras has more insights than many a 600 page novel. Her style is rich and dense, and I do NOT feel that she is projecting the wisdom of a middle age woman back onto a 15-year old. Consider: "I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think."Or, "You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationships, or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it."

The book is also about the "expat" existence, that transcends the 40,000 French "colons," who were the raison d'etre for drawing both France, and later, the United States, into seemingly endless war, first for their "lifestyles," but later, for the "glory," "honor", and eventually, "saving face," of their respective countries. But this particular expat story did not involve riches, and a fancy lifestyle, but poverty, the "barely getting by," that was rather surprising, even though they too had servants. Consider: "... from the frightful loneliness of serving in out-posts up-country, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever and oblivion." They lived primarily in Sadec, a small town in the Mekong delta, which alas, I had never heard of. They did have a large house, with the veranda, and could see the "mountains of Siam," in the evening, which was the only puzzling part of the book, since clearly you couldn't.

That quibble aside, Marguerite Duras has written a rich, beautiful novel, concerning the time when we thought we were fresh, and awaking into one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence, and as will happen all too frequently, it was tawdry.
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The Sea Wall Revisited
Duras' 3rd novel 'The Sea Wall' revisits her own past and appears to be again autobiograpical. For those familiar with her best known work 'The Lover' it runs to a similar postcolonial format. She is believed to have written 'The Sea Wall' first and waited for her family to be gone before she could attempt to tell the truth about her youth, which, she claimed to have done in 'The Lover'. While I found'The Sea Wall' interesting the novel did not move as smoothly as her other work and was less satisfiying in it's outcome. But as a French postcolonial text with a feminist leaning, it is very interesting especially from a comparative perspective.

Struggles of Colonial life in French IndoChina
Duras wrote this novel right in the middle of France's struggle with the war of independence in Indochina. That is where this novel takes place. It is a compelling, well illstrated, and masterfully composed piece of writing that is actually semi-autobiographical (many events of Duras' life appear as events in the novel). It is based upon a family's constant struggle with the endless difficulties with life in the country and their many and frequent bouts with the constant desperation that is portrayed throught the entire course of the book. It is a wonderful book to read and (undoubtedly) enjoy.

The Sea Wall
The Sea Wall is a fine example of Duras' cinematic and romantic writing style. Like The Lover, this novel is semi-autobiographical, and is set in French colonial Indochine.It is the story of a poor widow's desperate fight against the world she is trapped in, exemplified by the sea wall she constructs to stop the yearly encroachment of the sea on her useless concession of land. Although her efforts are futile, she bravely, or sometimes absurdly, maintains hope in the midst of poverty and her children's growing restlessness. ... Read more

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There are no vacations from love....

In this careful translation from the French novel by Marguerite Duras, five Parisians spend an interminable three days of their vacations at a dreary Italian beach resort. There is nothing to do but talk, drink bitter Camparis, and contemplate (or perhaps consummate) a love affair or two. As the days wear on, they imperceptibly change some of their beliefs, from For some time I have not liked the idea of changing the world at all costs to But certainly it is necessary to change the world, concluding with There are no vacations from love....Love, it is necessary to live it completely with its boredom and everything; there are no vacations from that. ... Read more

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Duras in Italy
Let's hope it gets back in to print. Perhaps one of Duras' most overlooked masterpieces set in torrid central Italy, forest fires creep closer to the resort, and mourning mine-searcher's mother awaits night and day the permitto bury her dead son. The senseless waiting and order we construct to hidethe shallowness of our lives. ... Read more

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The extraordinary pages of The War, written in 1944 but finished in 1985, form a totally new image of the heroine of The Lover and, through her, of Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. Married and living in Paris, part of a resistance network headed by Franois Mitterand, Duras is swept up in the turmoil of the period. She tells of nursing her starving husband back to life on his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who is attracted to her. The result is a book as moving as it is harrowing--perhaps Duras's finest. Amazon.com Review
Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important writers,was a member of the French Resistancemovementthroughout the Second World War.Written in 1944 but not publisheduntil 1985, this is her compelling personalstory of living in Paris duringthe Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very powerful, personal view of the German Occupation
This memoir is a very heartfelt testiment to love, longing, hunger, suspicion, pain and regret.It is always a treat when a writer of Duras' caliber is witness to extraordinary events and the reader is pulled along as she desperately tries to find out information about her imprisoned husband.The fact that the episodes are presented out of order is slightly disconcerting I felt in the sense that the book becomes a collection of several periods rather than a linear narrative.

A Monument Not a Diary
"Memoirists who reveal turbulent pasts are faulted for exhibitionism," writes Greg Lichtenberg in his essay, "Life is also Here: Toward a Manifesto of Memoir," while those with superficially quiet lives are blamed for having no story."Marguerite Duras has a profound story to tell, whether it's exhibitionism or not.Her intent, which has a much larger scope than a memoir with the structure of a simple diary, seemes to be to humanize and personalize the wartime chaos and utter dehumanization of 1940s France under Nazi domination.She sets a record about the Holocaust.She makes a monument rather than writes a diary.This is why her memoir rises above those that Lichtenberg criticizes, those that "seem a pornography of emotions, offering up whatever excess of misery will provoke a fleeting response"; what he calls, "a talk-show between book covers."The War is crafted not written.You won't find mind-numbing cliches but only imaginative language.And the language will move you. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Un roman orientaliste par excellence
Edward Said wrote "Orientalism", in which he criticized the West and Western scholars, novelists, and artists for creating images and discourses about the "East" (in his case mostly the Middle East) which then allowed the West to feel that they knew the peoples and cultures of much of the world, and further, that this supposedly-accurate knowledge allowed them to control that part of the world.The lethargic, inchoate, unknowable East had to be ruled by people with get-up-and-go, who else but Westerners ?The West explained the "others" to themselves and came to dominate even Eastern thought about the East itself.The history of the post-colonial era has been one of gradual "de-orientalizing".As an anthropologist who has worked in India and lived in many Asian countries, I found Duras' novel extremely offensive in a way, though I admit her style of writing is intriguing.She "controls" the East, shaping it---as if that were her right---in the way she wants, to produce a certain effect.She plays with geography, she plays with politics and history, paying no attention to any aspect of reality.She presumes to be able to enter into the thoughts of a poor Cambodian girl kicked out of her village home for being unmarried and pregnant.While novels dealing with Westerners in other locales are often very interesting, it is generally a poor gambit for Westerners to try to view the world through the eyes of non-Westerners.I strongly feel that Duras' attempt here borders on the insulting.As for the other characters, their emotions, words, and actions are extremely vague, nothing much happens, the reader penetrates very little into minds or motives.Atmosphere is everything.

Unless you are a lover of such atmosphere unconnected to any real sort of place, you are going to find this book either tedious or annoying.I found it to be both.Calcutta is a teeming city of political and intellectual ferment, full of poverty and great wealth side by side, literature, and constant lively discussion, but you get absolutely zero sense of that here.Duras' characters move in an unreal world in a fog of "artsiness".French literature has a well-deserved, grand reputation, but I would say that THE VICE-CONSUL occupies a position far to the rear in the serried ranks of great French novels.
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Incroyable!
This is an astonishing piece of work. While it's unlikely that any of us will EVER see a production in our lifetimes (what producer would be mad enought to try to mount it?), I think I could probably die happy if given the chance, with a sympathetic and visionary director, to play the role of the French Vice Consul from Lahore. Any takers? ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (7)

Small book with a large impact
This book is great to read again and again and still find new meanings and personal understandings each time.It is deceptively light - and the rich meanings underneath the words could easily be missed because of the style in delivery.A Beautiful piece of truth and human poetry.

hmmm.....?
not as accessible as some of her other work... it is in some ways connected to "blue eyes, black hair" which you might like to read first....

powerful stuff, if a bit ... hard to get into at times, but as always the writing is beautiful.

Beautifully hypontic
I picked up "Malady of Death" in a bargain bin at Waldenbooks many years ago.Having heard a great deal about "The Lover," also by Duras, I decided that at a mere 60+ pages and at a ridiculously low price, there was little to lose.I found myself reading it and re-reading it.There isn't much to the story, nor is it much of one.However, this is not so much a case of what is written as much as how it is written.Duras language is extremely poetic with an ever present sense of longing and sorrow. The lyrical quality in her writing is absolutely magical. The simple story of someone paying for companionship, intimacy and, ultimately, sex because of his inability to love is hardly a groundbreaking premise, but, again, its worth and beauty lie in how it is communicated and the sensation you experience in its wake.Very beautiful, indeed.

An Intriguing Story
Hmmm. One could write a review longer than the book, it seems; I wonder if that would miss the point.I suppose one could impose a number of interpretations upon this very brief novel, but I though of it as a rather literal story.A very lonely and probably shy man pays a woman to spend several nights with him to see if he can ever love or be loved.Sadly, the answer is no.And then she is gone.His effort to exert and enforce control proves to be impotent.Even though he won't even allow her to voice her pleasure - why? - she seems to feelo only a reserved pity for him; not anger, hatred, resentment, fear, or any other emotion I would expect a woman in her position to feel.Such is his own powerlessness, his malady of death.This is an excellent book which, yes, can be read in the book store without spending any money.Shame on you for doing that, and not supporting such inquisitive literature, and giving yourself the opportunity to re-read and study the text.

Read "Blue Eyes, Black Hair" to understand this better
I thought that "The Malady of Death" was better that "Blue Eyes, Black Hair" in that it was shorter and more to the point, but if you want to read a more in-depth look at the same basic story line, then "Blue Eyes, Black Hair" brings insight into yet another atypical Duras romance even though it tends to drag on.If you like Duras, but want a book that flows easier, I recommend "10:30 on a Summer Night." ... Read more

Product Description
Written in the splendid bareness of her late style, these pages are Marguerite Duras’s theory of literature. Comparing a dying fly to the work of style; remembering the trance and incurable disarray of writing, recreating the last moments of a British pilot shot during World War II and buried next to her house, or else letting out a magisterial "So what?" to question six decades of story telling, all operate as a deceitful yet indispensable confession. This is the final literary testament of one of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century. ... Read more

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A beautiful book
"Writing" combines elements of fictional narrative, literary theory, and conversational Q&A all in Duras's recognizable voice. It is a wonderful book allowing readers to experience both Duras's writingprocess and the finished outcome.

literary testament/memoir explaining Duras's theory of writ
this is the last book by Duras, as she passed away on March 4, 1996. Recommended for anyone who appreciates the spledid bareness of her late style. Her theory of writing, why she wrote, and what compells writers...fascinating, and reads like a meditation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Tainted Love to the Max
An encounter in a cafe brings a man and woman together who are both obsessed with a blue eyed, black haired man.
Each filling a need the other has without touching, yet, "Blue Eyes,Black Hair" is so erotic in it's content that it is indecent, tainted, disturbing.
At times it was difficult to absorb and I wanted to close the book, but the writing and style was so unusual that I was intrigued and outraged at the same time.
Duras gives the reader an atmosphere of darkness,weeping, lonliness, and death.
The woman wears black silk over her face... a metaphor for shame...feelings of loss, hiding what she truly is or is not.

- He walks around the white sheets and along the walls.He asks her not to sleep, to remain naked and without the black silk.He walks around her body- ...from Blue Eyes, Black Hair...

This image reminded me of a dog circling his prey, not knowing whether to kill it, play with it, or eat it.The man does all of this.

Obsession is a sickness.Duras sets the tone.A room where the man and woman meet to weep, sleep, wrapping themselves in black silk and white sheets.Two people who are lost...obsessed with one another's obsession.Until finally...the obsession becomes one and the man and woman become the same person.

Note...This is my second book by Duras. I must admit, I've never read an author like her before. The imagery is so strong that she can use less words. I feel as if I have been inside the room myself and I don't like it!

For Duras Sophisticates
Blue Eyes, Black Hair might not be recommended for a first-time reader of Duras. The book is not flowing or visual or erotic in the manner of The Lover. It seems more a continuation of Duras' literary themes rather than a novel that stands by itself. It might be of more interest to devotees of Duras' greater body of work than to the casual reader. In it, a man sees another man, briefly, through a window, and feels an attraction as strong as love. Weeping in a cafe, later the same night, he meets a young woman with black hair and blue eyes who reminds him very much of the man he saw and desired but never met. The two acknowledge to one another that they are both lonely, and the man asks the woman to go with him to his room by the sea. He wants to watch her sleep. The novel is basically a story of the transferal of desire and the lack of communion between two individuals. The book explores the idea of objectifying a love, of two people wanting things so different that their desires somehow become similar, and of feelings involved in close emotional relationships between people of different sexual orientations. It addresses the themes of loneliness, the exploration of desire and despair, of distance and fear, and of the pain in never really knowing - emotionally or physically - the desired other. ... Read more

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Disaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight years), and disgusted by a mistress whose vapid optimism arouses his most violent misogyny, the narrator of The Sailor from Gibraltar finds himself at the point of complete breakdown while vacationing in Florence. After leaving his mistress and the Ministry behind forever, he joins the crew of The Gibraltar, a yacht captained by Anna, a beautiful American in perpetual search of her sometime lover, a young man known only as the "Sailor from Gibraltar." First published in 1952, this early novel of Duras's ... Read more

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Sun drenched malaise
I confess that in spite of having studied French I had never read Marguerite Duras until picking up The Sailor From Gibraltar. It is a stunning gem of a book. I found myself wanting to put it down not because it wasn't good but because it was too effective. The kind of malaise, boredom, and drunken, sun-addled stupor in which the characters are adrift comes off the page and settles on the reader.

The plot is deceptively simple; it starts with the narrator, who is on vacation from a Bartleby-like job in the Foreign Service, where he copies birth and death certificates.He is oppressed by the heat, often drunken and annoyed with his mistress who insists on playing the tourist and has expectations of marriage. Feeling trapped, the narrator abandons her and his job in a little Italian coastal village in favor of Anna, a mysterious widow who searches the ocean in her yacht for the sailor from Gibraltar, a fugitive murderer with whom she had an affair as a young woman.

The real story takes place in the subtle nuances of the narrator's growing relationship with Anna, the crew of the yacht and the influence of the unseen sailor from Gibraltar. The characters are selfish, indulgent, and often ridiculous and yet it is compelling to watch them in their lazy and never ending quest for the sailor. Even these vapid individuals become existential fodder for Duras.

Indeed, seems to come out of the same world from which Albert Camus wrote The Stranger. In this world, the heat of the sun could make you quit your job, abandon your mistress and travel around the world or murder a man.

It is no surprise that The Sailor from Gibraltar was adapted for film. Duras conjures intense, haunting imagery. I can almost see the camera angles and the shimmer of sunlight reflecting off sand and water.

This is the second imprint from Open Letter Books that I have read and if their choices for works in translation continue to be this good, I will start to seek out more works from their catalog. Kudos to Barbara Bray fora dazzling translation.

Pleasantly Meandering Travel Story
One of my fondest memories from college is sitting in my fav bohemian café near the music school and reading Marguerite Duras's 1952 novel "The Sailor from Gibraltar." It was February in one of those dim, decaying cities on the Erie where most of the industry has moved overseas, leaving only a few colleges and hospitals, as well as the retail sector, to provide employment. Under the gray skies, dirty snow, and dingy pseudo-Modernist buildings, the town had a sadly Communist-era Eastern European feel. I was often reminded of Mati Unt's "Things in the Night," a 1990 Estonian novel set partially amid the endless Soviet-built concrete apartment blocks of Tallinn. Unfortunately, an act of terrorism destroys Tallinn's power supply on New Year's Day, leaving the residential district seemingly deserted beneath suffocating layers of snow. That is kind of how you feel in the upstate New York's "rust belt" during the winter too.

But Duras's pleasantly meandering story provided a nice respite. The plot is deceptively simple: a bored, angry, frustrated Frenchman on vacation in Italy with his vapid mistress ends up running off with a wealthy widow who spends her days roaming the world in her yacht, forever looking for her "sailor from Gibraltar." There really isn't any conflict per se. The novel is essentially a travel narrative in which the characters are secondary to beautifully evocative prose that paints vivid portraits of beaches and dances along the Italian coast, the bejeweled waters of the Mediterranean, the crowded streets of China, and the post-colonial exoticism of North Africa. I think "The Sailor from Gibraltar" is best summed up as the antithesis to Paul Bowles's "The Sheltering Sky," the darkly hypnotic tale, first published in 1949, of insipid American tourists lost in the stark and monotonous dunes of the Sahara. Interestingly, both novels draw from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but whereas Bowles and Conrad both focus on death and madness, Duras treats the journey into the alien unknown as merely one more episode in a leisurely, never-ending adventure. Although people meet, fall in love, form friendships, and then leave each other, "The Sailor from Gibraltar" never takes itself too seriously. It simply floats along from port to port, skillfully recalling the casual glamour of the mid-century, that era before plastic flip-flops and dopey t-shirts. It is both the ultimate beach read and a real literary treat.

So if ever you find yourself trapped in the winters of upstate New York, seeing out your window nothing but a grayscale panorama, this is the perfect book for you. My only complaint is that cover Open Letter Press has designed - it looks way too much like the new edition of "Catch-22" with its bold, heavy colors that do nothing to suggest the beauty of Duras's airy prose. But publishing aesthetics aside, "The Sailor from Gibraltar" comes highly recommended.

Give it all up for a trip to the unknown... they did!
I picked this up on a whim. I've enjoyed Duras in the past and it was astory about travel and love - perfect.Turns out, it was an excellentnovel.

The beginning felt slow, but that's because Duras has a tendencyto describe things so dispassionately that it feels dull.Later in thenovel, all those descriptions had laid a necessary foundation for eventsand conversations that would have seemed completely disjointed without asolid background.The plot sounds like a soap opera: man on vacationdecides to leave boring girlfriend and dull job meets a rich widow sailingaround the world in search of long lost lover.However, and thankgoodness, it's not that simple, and not nearly that sappy.Both man andwoman aggressively resist falling in love.Neither of them want to, butthey do, but they don't.... Plus, there are a handful of colorfulcharacters they meet and travel with along the way.

It's acharacter-intense novel that uses a simple plot as a basis to developcomplicated personalities and relationships.Special bonus, it's out ofprint - so you can read something unusual and spark conversationyourself!

I recommend this for folks who like to analyze and thenre-analyze followed by over-analyze life's happenings and participants.Beprepared to not want to put it down towards the end!

Beautiful, haunting
A beautiful, haunting story.Love/obsession that may be only what it's perceived to be, or maybe not.By far the best of Duras' early works.A book I knew I'd have to read again before I even finished the first time. ... Read more

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When the circus critic is an acrobat, herself....
The beauty of this book is portioned out equally between the skill and dexterity of Hewitt and that of her subjects. Not only does Hewitt walk with ease across the tightrope of autobiography, her entire book is, as awhole, a perfectly balanced affair. It includes the distinct, prismaticeffects of each of her selected modern French female autobiographers as sheshines a new light on autobiography--but it also includes how each of theautobiographers' lights reflect upon and and influence one another. Thebook is balanced, as well, in the experiences of the French writers,themselves; Hewitt listens and gives her attention to a wide variety ofFrench females. feminists, anti-feminists, being French in a foreign land,being Foreign in a French land, being lesbian, heterosexual, anti-gender, ablack writer, a white writer--Hewitt values the distinct spice eachexperience adds to the overall genre of autobiography. Although thisvariety makes Hewitt's book seem to be a superficial sampler of modernfeminine French autobiography, nothing can be further from the truth. Withconcise, yet exciting language, Hewitt sometimes digs so deeply into theexperiences of her subjects and how they are novel and unique, thisreviewer literally had an urge to go out immediately to the library andspend the rest of her life studying autobiography. This is notto say that Hewitt's book is flawless; no book is. In order to generate hergreat balance, Hewitt appears to stretch the genre of autobiography too farin order to fit her specifications. In searching for non-white,non-traditionally-gendered and foreign French voices, she included the workof Maryse Conde and Monique Wittig, skilled writers, but unfortunately forHewitt, not autobiographers. Hewitt breaches the integralattraction/repulsion of autobiography in confusing what are clearlyfictions with self-references, and the autobiographical genre. Althoughthere is no clear-cut definition of autobiography, the easiest and mostefficient way to discover what is and isn't autobiography is to ask thewriter. In these cases, the works of the authors are certainlyself-referential, but they are clearly not autobiography. Hewitt addressesthese concerns, true, but her justifications for their inclusion in a bookabout autobiography are not ultimately satisfying. Yet, thisbook is a gem, filled with fresh insights into the work of the writers shestudies and very interesting hypotheses. It is a fairly easy read, clearlydigestible for the non-academic, and the readers' knowledge of Hewitt'ssubjects is not necessary to understand and appreciate this impressivebook. ... Read more

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Save The Lover for later; start with the novellas.
Duras seems like the Simone Weil of fiction: her characters philosophize while they get undressed and into bed. While Duras covers the same material (man, woman, love, deceit) at least these are fine subjects in the hands of a master crafter.I don't think we can hold it against her for writing them over and over.

A Good Introduction to Duras
"10:30 on a Summer Night" is by far the best of the four novels in this book, focusing on murder and infidelity during a vacation outside Madrid."Moderato Cantible" is good but not as intriguing as "10:30 on a Summer Night" and is about an alcoholic mother developing an odd relationship with a stranger in a café on the way home from her son's piano lesson."The Square" has some good lines but is generally slow, focusing solely on a salesman and a servant talking in the park.

I don't get it
Two of my closest, most intellectual/cultural-elite type friends have raved about Marguerite Duras.So I read "The Lover."Great story.Okay...they tell me "Moderato Cantabile" is her masterpiece.I search for an English translation, find this foursome.Terrific, I think, I can explore even more.I must ask the reviewers of this work...Have you read it all together????Every story is the same, folks!This woman had one, maybe two stories (okay, Hiroshima Mon Amour makes three) in her blood.Take an alcoholic woman with a hidden sexual agenda, throw in an unfaithful (substitute uptight/unattentive, etc) husband...or father (oh yeah, don't forget the incest angle), then place them all in some tedious, drawn-out situation (aftermath of a murder investigation, waiting for a construction contracter, a storm, an afternoon on a park bench), then let them TALK.And talk.And talk.Get it?I may not be the super intellectual, cultural elite type, but I know pretension when I read it.Skip Duras.Or...better...read "The Lover," pretend you know all about her, and watch the others at a party try to impress you. ... Read more

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The story of a story never told.
There are few authors as capable as Marguerite Duras. This book really, really excited me. Its a ridiculously short read, so please do yourself a favor and check it out. If you can't find it on amazon[.com] or in your local library or bookstore (I'm told it is out-of-print), try Powell's or Strand - they at least should have copies.

In "Emily L" our narrator sits (and sots) in a French port cafe with her lover and closely studies a particular English couple. Before long our narrator is narrating, to her lover and to us her readers, a story about this couple's history, particularly the complex and tragic story of the English woman. What remains unclear throughout the novel is how much of this story is based on real information gathered by our narrator and how much is pure fiction, a story within the story. All indications seem to point to a near total fiction. Moreover, just how much of what we are told can we as readers use in our own parallel study of the narrator and her relationship? That question is arguably the most important one in this novel.

"It began with fear," the novel begins (3). The narrator begins by, naturally, describing the setting and introducing herself and her lover as characters. But she really doesn't tell us much (or anything actually) about either herself or her companion, except that they are both writers. Very early in the novel she tells her lover that she has plans to write about their relationship. "I said I'd decided to write our story.... I was going to write the story of the affair we'd had together, the one that was still there and taking forever to die" (12). He's not thrilled by this suggestion, but then neither is she. Here is the very heart of that fear mentioned in the novels first words, and this fear reveals itself fully by the very next page. "No. What I'm writing now is something else that will somehow include it - something much broader perhaps. But to write about it directly - no, that's all over, I couldn't do it" (13). And there it is. Nowhere in this novel do we read her own actual story in terms we can read as literally *her story*. The story we do read from that page on to the end, the story of the English couple, comes in as something of a surrogate story. Our narrator explains: "The book will tell the truth. Whether we said it ourselves or heard it said through a wall, someone other than you to someone other than me, it will be all the same as far as the book is concerned, so long as you heard it at the same time I did and in the same place. In the same fear" (16).

The driving force of "Emily L" is the subjective nature of the story we're told. As our narrator is herself a novelist, "Emily L" is ultimately a novel about writing. Reading this novel we must constantly question the reliability and transparency of our narrator/author. How much of this is fiction? How much is truth? Whose truth? Why the fear? Can we learn anything about that fear in this novel? If not, is a knowledge that there is a fear enough of a story in itself? And are we satisfied, as readers, by not getting the whole story? How much more interesting is the 'barrier' story we get than the actual story? These matters, these questions, are the life and blood of the novel. The story of the English couple is compelling all by itself, but frankly its just the mechanics of Duras's infinitely clever and utterly profound novel.

Don't assume that you can assume
Emily L. is one of the required books for my current English Elective course, Post-Modern Fiction.

There are two main characters in the book, a person called "I" and another "You", both French.This couple is observing another couple in a bar, and based on what snippets of conversation they hear, they construct a story around the latter couple.

This book is fiction, no doubt, but soon you begin to question which parts of the story that "I" constructed are based on true observation, and which parts are pure fiction.

A fiction within a fiction, Emily L. draws you in completely.This is a translation, but it does not interfere with the gist, tone, or mood of the story.Some nuances might have been lost due to translation, but that does not prevent you from enjoying the book.

After all, it does take a lot for a "general fiction"-category book to hook an avid sci-fi/fantasy reader like Yours Truly. ... Read more

Product Description
A memoir by the author of The Lover and Summer Rain describes her relationship with a man thirty years her junior who has helped her overcome, despair, illness, and alcoholism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Not Duras' best but enjoyable.
This memoir depends upon three threads: first, the first summer together for Yann and Marguerite; second, the relationship between a 6 year old boy and his camp counsellor; third, a story woven by the counsellor of a boy and a shark.The first thread is vintage Duras - much meaning packed into spare language.The second thread has puzzling discrepancies - the boy, 6 in 1980 saw his younger sister killed by a German soldier; his sister's name is either Judith or Maria (a Jewish-Christian dichotomy?).This tread succeeds in exploring the role of being Jews and of age differentials for Yann and Marguarite.The third strand attempts to add a mythic layer to the story.However, the story is too sparse, too pedestrian, too poor a tale to fulfil the role.

I recommend the book to fans of Duras but would suggest there are better works to serve as an introduction.

Stunning Imagery
Yann Andrea Steiner is a difficult read butrewarding.Some of the images she presents are very beautiful.The blanks in her writing and especially in this novel creates a grey, dreamlike atmosphere.This bookshould be read on a rainy winter afternoon.

Too much even for a Duras fan.
I'd have to agree with the synopsis, I couldn't help feeling that if I was heavily into the bottle I might find the fable that fills too much of this book more interesting. Too much time is spent whilst reading wishing thatDuras would concentrate on other things, her relationship with Yann forstarters instead of skirting the issue. If she didn't want it tobepersonal why write it? ... Read more

Product Description
"It's the women who upset the applecart. Between themselves they talk only about the practicalities of life," declares Duras in this collection of her transcribed conversations with friend Jerome Beaujour. Some of her free-ranging meditations are short and deceptively simple, while many are autobiographical and reveal her most intimate thoughts about motherhood, her struggle with alcohol, her love for a young man, and more. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Target Reader
I really don't think I was the target audience for this book.I had a very hard time getting through it, mostly because Duras has this infuriating habit of saying general, encompassing statements without any real facts to back them up.

Case in point:"All men are homosexual."

No.No, Marguerite, I strongly disagree with you.If you would offer some concrete reasons as to why you feel this way, that would be fine, but in the book, no strong reasons are really offered.You just say things and continue onward in the book.

This is not to say that the book is entirely without merit.There are several short sections in the book that I thought were worth thinking about.She has some interesting things to say... I just wish they were phrased in a way that didn't make me grit my teeth.

If you're new to Duras, I would suggest starting with "The Lover."It is a much less frustrating book to get through.It's also fairly interesting.

Apologies to those who loved this book.Perhaps you were more her target audience than I was.

¿Martini?
Creo que Duras es una de aquellas escritoras como Anais Nin (preferiblemente con sus diarios) o Sylvia Palth, con la "sharpiada" inteligencia de lograr que sus historias personales se conviertan también en las historias del lector. Mujeres que analizan la vida, la desgarran y luego operan de nuevo para reparar los tejidos abiertos. Este libro son varias historias sobre varios temas. Son cortas y intensamente deliciciosas de leer.

I do believe Duras is one of those writters like Anais Nin or Sylvia Plath, with a sharp intelligence of achiving the task of transforming their own stories into stories also for the reader. Women analizing life, to rip it and then been able to repair the open wounds. This books is about many stories of many topics. The stories are short and intensly delicious to read. ... Read more

Product Description
Lol Stein is a beautiful young woman, securely married, settled in a comfortable life, and a voyeur. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

The sublime art of MD
Duras is an author whose books often take some preparation to read.If you are familiar with shifting perspective and narration, and feminist literary criticism, this will prove a fascinating and rewarding read.

Lol V. Stein is traumatized in her youth, jilted by her lover.From then on, her life becomes enigmatic, even to herself.We follow the story, unsure at the beginning who is telling it.When we find out, pieces of a puzzle fall into place--but Duras never wraps anything up or gives simple answers to the complex problems of life.Few authors have created meditations on love and loss that are as profound and complex as Duras' great novels--and this is one of them.

A Haunting, Erotically Charged Novel of Memory
Lol Stein was nineteen years old when her fiance, Michael Richardson, abandoned her. The moment lives starkly in Lol's memory, even after she's been married for ten years, after she's had three children, after she should have moved on with her life. The memory endures until it can be revised, until Lol can make a new memory to replace it.

Tatiana Karl, Lol's best friend in childhood, was with Lol the night her fiance left her. He did it publicly, at a prominent dance in the Town Beach casino, while Lol and Tatiana watched. Lol collapses in a state of depression, becomes uncommunicative, changes. She is brought back to South Tahla, the place of her birth, to recover. It is here that she meets John Bedford, marries him and seemingly moves on with her life, literally leaving South Tahla, as well, for ten years and breaking off all contact with old friends, including Tatiana. But the memory lingers, darkly, and can only be erased when Lol and her husband return to South Tahla, return to the place where the memory was made.

Lol works at erasing the mental trauma of her past with a new memory, a memory wrought from obsession, voyeurism, and calculated seduction. She resumes her relationship with Tatiana, now married, and makes a new relationship with Tatiana's lover. Haunting and erotically charged, marked by a disturbing psychological aridity, and written in a complex, non-linear style marked by the shifting viewpoint of its narrator, "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" is another example of why Marguerite Duras deserves to be ranked as one of the finest writers of Twentieth century literature.

Yuck--boring
I read for some time waiting for it to be interesting.No such luck.

A Haunting and Erotically Charged Novel of Memory
Lol Stein was nineteen years old when her fiance, Michael Richardson, abandoned her.The moment lives starkly in Lol's memory, even after she's been married for ten years, after she's had three children, after she should have moved on with her life.The memory endures until it can be revised, until Lol can make a new memory to replace it.

Tatiana Karl, Lol's best friend in childhood, was with Lol the night her fiance left her.He did it publicly, at a prominent dance in the Town Beach casino, while Lol and Tatiana watched.Lol collapses in a state of depression, becomes uncommunicative, changes.She is brought back to South Tahla, the place of her birth, to recover.It is here that she meets John Bedford, marries him and seemingly moves on with her life, literally leaving South Tahla, as well, for ten years and breaking off all contact with old friends, including Tatiana.But the memory lingers, darkly, and can only be erased when Lol and her husband return to South Tahla, return to the place where the memory was made.

Lol works at erasing the mental trauma of her past with a new memory, a memory wrought from obsession, voyeurism, and calculated seduction.She resumes her relationship with Tatiana, now married, and makes a new relationship with Tatiana's lover.Haunting and erotically charged, marked by a disturbing psychological aridity, and written in a complex, non-linear style marked by the shifting viewpoint of its narrator, "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" is another example of why Marguerite Duras deserves to be ranked as one of the finest writers of Twentieth century literature.

Disappointing
_The Ravishing of Lol Stein_ tells the story of a woman who watches her fiance abandon her for another woman and feels compelled to reenact the tragedy in later life.

It's a compelling premise, but I found myself curiously unmoved by the characters and ultimately by the writing itself-- it seemed too inflated with its own sense of tragedy and pathos and I felt like a crucial sense of humor was somehow missing from the situation.

I used to really enjoy Duras when I would read her in my early twenties, so I'm not sure if it was the individual book that I didn't like, or whether I've just lost my taste for the emotional drama that she specializes in as a writer. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (5)

This is not a biography
The only reason I finished reading this book was because I'd not read any about Duras.

The writing is so stunningly bad that I had to control my anger as I read (melodramtic repetitions, little fragments that figure in soap opera, so on) because I was still curious about Duras and thought I might learn something. The translation is as awful as the text. (I'll save you examples.)

This is not a biography.It's a badly written travelogue of a literary and political career.Duras constructed an amazing life and I look forward to a biography that might open that up.

This piece of dribble is worthless.

Coming Closer to the Mystery That Is Duras
Laure Adler's book comes close, but no book will ever come close enough. Duras' fans will undoubtedly read anything written about her, so anxious are they for shimmers of truth regarding the woman who left such a perplexing legacy of literature. Adler's biography of the fascinating French writer is good and it is certainly much more revealing than say, Alain Vircondolet's DURAS which might be more of a pleasure to read (he took Duras up on a challenge to try and write as she did), but says far less about the woman.

There are times when Adler's sentence structure seems choppy, and this may be hard for more sophisticated readers, but bear in mind that although Anne-Marie Glasheen seems to have made a suitable translation, translations can be difficult and something is almost always lost.

The emphasis here should really be on content and Adler did a fair job considering the difficulty in separating the real Duras from the invented one. For those looking merely for facts, Adler clears up the myth around THE LOVER, does a superb job of showing Duras through the war years, and gives a reasonable look at her friendship with Mitterand. One will miss an in-depth report on her relations with her family and will undoubtedly want to know more - especially about the elusive younger brother. As we read we become struck by the presence of men in Duras' life, and we yearn a bit for insights from a close woman friend. Unfortunately, Duras did not seem to allow many women into her life.

Adler's book is recommended for any fan of Duras' literature as it will at least give some insight - possibly new - into her working mind. But don't expect miracles. And expect more books forthcoming. Duras' son, Outa, is a rather silent voice in this book and one can't help but think that there is part of Marguerite alive in the world who has not yet spoken (written) his thoughts.

shedding light on the shadows?
Laure Adler has written a biography of Ms. Duras that is both compelling and confounding, and although I appreciated her considerable efforts, I finished the book probably "knowing" less about Duras than when I started.

No doubt this can be somewhat attributed to the contradictions that appear to have been a staple of Duras's life and conscience.If Ms. Adler is to be believed, Duras was the most conflicted and Protean artist of the 20th century, forever shape-shifting and believing opposites at once.For every bit of evidence Ms. Adler offers about Duras being X, she offers (at least) a Y and Z stating almost the exact opposite proposition.So I constantly found myself asking, Was she X, Y, or Z?

If she was indeed all three, then I would like the biographer to step in and make some comment to sum up the disparate parts.Rarely, if ever, does Ms. Adler see this as her function.She faithfully details the facts of Duras's life and works, but she (almost) never comments or crystallizes them.We are told on the dust jacket that Ms. Adler has been trained as an historian and as a journalist, and it is decidedly the latter profession that seems to dominate her scrutinization of Duras.Plenty of facts are offered.There is plenty of thesis and antithesis depicted, but we never seem to attain any synthesis, leaving us in the world of reportage rather than biography.

Adler does triumph in her depiction of postwar Paris in the forties and fifties.Here, she is fully in historical mode and offers readers fascinating insight into the personalities and politics of the time.Rarely have I seen such an enlightened discussion of the artistic and political Zeitgeist of that particular era.The cast of characters and their interactions are well defined and amusingly recounted.If only the remainder of the book had been so incisive.

As a feminist--or at least I would suppose she is, given that she has written a number of histories of women--Ms. Adler should be chided for her somewhat myopic concentration on Duras. One criticism that feminists constantly leveled against male biographers in the 70s and 80s was that they only chose other males as their subjects and, once chosen, only unearthed their connections to other males--and their power games, professional lifes, etc., thereby giving short shrift to personal relationships with wifes, lovers, families, etc.Here Adler discusses at length Duras's relationship with her mother, which was indeed a pivotal one, as borne out in her books and films. However, Adler fails to adequately explain the motivations or even the emotions of the males around Duras. Considering that Duras started a long-term affair with another man (Mascolo) while her husband (Anthelme) was in a concentration camp, and then kept the affair going for years afterward while the men became best of friends, we learn startingly little about how these men felt about this fact or how they accommodated it into their lives.Later on, Ms. Adler talks of Duras's relationship with her son, but this discussion is mainly held to one chapter that investigates their lives while her son was a boy. We rarely learn how the two got along as adults, which strikes me as an omission, given that it must be of some interest how the son of a major artist would respond to a mother who was so adored and reviled in her own lifetime--and who must have been difficult to live with, as an artist, an alcoholic, and a woman who self-defined around the substantial number of men who occupied important places in her sexual and intellectual lives.

In sum, I enjoyed the book and think that Ms. Adler has done some very impressive work.At the same time, given the access she received to personal materials from major players in Duras's life--including her husbands--she could have done so much more if she had expanded her vision and chose to move beyond mere journalism.If you want to know various facts of Duras's life, you may well enjoy this biography.If you want to walk away from the book with a definitive sense of who Duras was--if you want to draw back the curatin and let some new light in--perhaps you should go elsewhere.Duras, we find in this biography, was a woman of many parts.Unfortunately, Ms. Adler does not give us an adequate picture of what she was as a whole.In the end, extensive reading of Duras's work may provide a better sense of who she was, despite all her trickery and deceit, than this biography could hope to accomplish.

shedding light on the shadows?
Laure Adler has written a biography of Ms. Duras that is both compelling and confounding, and although I appreciated her considerable efforts, I finished the book probably "knowing" less about Duras than when I started.

No doubt this can be somewhat attributed to the contradictions that appear to have been a staple of Duras's life and conscience.If Ms. Adler is to be believed, Duras was the most conflicted and Protean artist of the 20th century, forever shape-shifting and believing opposites at once.For every bit of evidence Ms. Adler offers about Duras being X, she offers (at least) a Y and Z stating almost the exact opposite proposition.So I constantly found myself asking, Was she X, Y, or Z?

If she was indeed all three, then I would like the biographer to step in and make some comment to sum up the disparate parts.Rarely, if ever, does Ms. Adler see this as her function.She faithfully details the facts of Duras's life and works, but she (almost) never comments or crystallizes them.We are told on the dust jacket that Ms. Adler has been trained as an historian and as a journalist, and it is decidedly the latter profession that seems to dominate her scrutinization of Duras.Plenty of facts are offered.There is plenty of thesis and antithesis depicted, but we never seem to attain any synthesis, leaving us in the world of reportage rather than biography.

Adler does triumph in her depiction of postwar Paris in the forties and fifties.Here, she is fully in historical mode and offers readers fascinating insight into the personalities and politics of the time.Rarely have I seen such an enlightened discussion of the artistic and political Zeitgeist of that particular era.The cast of characters and their interactions are well defined and amusingly recounted.If only the remainder of the book had been so incisive.

As a feminist--or at least I would suppose she is, given that she has written a number of histories of women--Ms. Adler should be chided for her somewhat myopic concentration on Duras. One criticism that feminists constantly leveled against male biographers in the 70s and 80s was that they only chose other males as their subjects and, once chosen, only unearthed their connections to other males--and their power games, professional lifes, etc., thereby giving short shrift to personal relationships with wifes, lovers, families, etc.Here Adler discusses at length Duras's relationship with her mother, which was indeed a pivotal one, as borne out in her books and films. However, Adler fails to adequately explain the motivations or even the emotions of the males around Duras. Considering that Duras started a long-term affair with another man (Mascolo) while her husband (Anthelme) was in a concentration camp, and then kept the affair going for years afterward while the men became best of friends, we learn startingly little about how these men felt about this fact or how they accommodated it into their lives.Later on, Ms. Adler talks of Duras's relationship with her son, but this discussion is mainly held to one chapter that investigates their lives while her son was a boy. We rarely learn how the two got along as adults, which strikes me as an omission, given that it must be of some interest how the son of a major artist would respond to a mother who was so adored and reviled in her own lifetime--and who must have been difficult to live with, as an artist, an alcoholic, and a woman who self-defined around the substantial number of men who occupied important places in her sexual and intellectual lives.

In sum, I enjoyed the book and think that Ms. Adler has done some very impressive work.At the same time, given the access she received to personal materials from major players in Duras's life--including her husbands--she could have done so much more if she had expanded her vision and chose to move beyond mere journalism.If you want to know various facts of Duras's life, you may well enjoy this biography.If you want to walk away from the book with a definitive sense of who Duras was--if you want to draw back the curatin and let some new light in--perhaps you should go elsewhere.Duras, we find in this biography, was a woman of many parts.Unfortunately, Ms. Adler does not give us an adequate picture of what she was as a whole.In the end, extensive reading of Duras's work may provide a better sense of who she was, despite all her trickery and deceit, than this biography could hope to accomplish.

Was Marguerite Duras a heroine or a monster?
Was Marguerite Duras a heroine or a monster?If Adler is to be believed, the famous French writer and filmmaker was both.This is a fascinating story of a woman who was alternately a patriot and a traitor during WWII.(She slept with the enemy, a Nazi sympathizer, to further her own career and simultaneously worked for the French Resistance.)She wrote sizzling, steamy fiction that she claimed chronicled her own, true adventures as a young femme fatale growing up in Indochina, as a student in Paris, as a radical politician and literary maven.She could be generous and loyal to a fault, or, in the blink of an eye, turn into a raging, arrogant harpy.

If the truth is stranger than fiction, then Duras was even more monstrous than the characters in her novels.This is the story, wonderfully told, of a truly sick ticket indeed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

A child seduces a young playboy
A true story, Marguerite Duras wrote of her scandalous love affair at the age of fourteen with the 26 year old heir of a wealthy Chinese family in Viet Nam.

Or rather she writes it anew. She first gave her story in "The Lover" which was turned into an equally scandalous film. She disagreed with the film's development, and wanted to rewrite the story in a way that matched her ideas for the film.

The Child seduces the playboy. She needs experience, she needs to be held down. She needs to shield her baby brother from her opium addicted elder brother. She needs to rescue her ruined mother. She needs a protector and finds a gentle, caring, fopish dandy of a man with money and connections. She makes him take her to his bachelor's nest, a garçonnière, and she uses him. Who is the master?

The Lover goes to his father to ask him to break off his long-arranged Chinese engagement and let him marry the Child instead. The father refuses and the Lover has not the gumption to set off on his own. He submits to his father's will but has him pay off the elder brother's gambling debts and arrange for the Child's family to go back to France. The Child and the Lover really did love each other. He is heartbroken but she is not; she is the stronger one and has her entire life ahead of her.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

"The Lover" unmasked
I read "The Lover" years ago, and though I found it incredible, I felt that it was missing something. It was too romantic, too vague, too soft. This book fills in all the blanks, and tells "the real story", and it pulls no punches. If "The Lover" were a soft, sweet sigh, this book would be a cry of longing, of despair for something so precious being lost. It is very similar to "The Lover", but it's so much more. The reader gets to really know these rebels, these outlaws in love. We get to know the country, the time, the sense of "being there" that the first book missed.

In "The Lover", the reader cannot get a sense of who these people were, the wealthy Chinese man and the poor white girl from Siagon. "The North China Lover" gives us what we need to believe in them. We get a truer sense of who this Chinese man was, his elegance, intellgence and sensitivity, his kindess. We learn more about the young girl, too. Her wildness, her misery over her family and their poverty, and her strong, uninhibited love. We meet her miserably poor and strange family, really for the first time. The "little brother" and the young girl's "treasure" Paulo; the older, cruel, despotic, and lost Pierre; her faded, weak, and yet somehow genteel mother. We also meet Thanh (mostly excluded from the film), an orphan from Siam whom the girl's mother picked off the street to be chaffuer, caretaker, and serrogate child. Duras loved them all, and she shows us why. We love them with her.

Because of my fascination with "The Lover", and with Duras herself, I found this book to be a gift of sorts. It fleshes the story out, it adds imagery that was mostly left out of the first book and out of the film. Saigon becomes real, the story becomes real. The writing style may bother some readers, but not readers of Duras. It's still her, but with an edge. The book is also written as a companion/screenplay for the film, so it's a bit disjoined at times. That, too, is classic Duras. If you enjoyed "The Lover", please read "The North China Lover". You won't be disappointed.

I agree
I agree with a lot of the readers of this book. I just recently have gotten reaqainted with this story after seeing it for the first time when it came out.To young to understand, it was a movie with cool love scenes.But now as a grown woman, it has envoke an interest and emotion like never before.I am not finished reading this but I have seen the movie and read "the Lover" several times in the past month.It has awakened a dragon that was lying dormant for a long time.I am sooooo glad to read this book, because it has answered so many questions that the movie did not.WHile "The Lover" is my favorite movie, I was left lingering with many questions unanswered.But in reading this book, I feel much more fulfilled.Excellent read and I cannot wait to read more of Duras' work.Look out for my screenplay in the future.While it is nothing like that story, the emotion that was envoked in me by loving this story, allowed the art inside of myself to reappear.Like an old friend lost in time...

fabulous
this is like a writers version of a directors cut of "the lover"...
if you loved the lover then you will love this :)

it fills in a lot of details that were not included in "The lover"...

answers some of the questions you might have been asking about "the lover"...

Marguerite Duras elobrates even further with this Novel!
I read this book because I love the movie. Marguerite Duras's novel is a fascinating retelling of the domestic experiences of her adolescence that have shaped her work. This book is far more daring and truthful, it emphasizes the tough realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed. This book both shock and entrance me. It's initially written as notes towards a film script for the "The Lover"; the book has grainy, film tic qualities of a documentary. Gone are the romantic and nostalgic readings of the past.

Here are the humiliations and passions of the poverty-ridden world in which Duras grew up: the intense sexuality of the young woman who was her friends and classmates, a group of adolescents impatient for the experiences of adulthood while still caught up in the conflicts of childhood. From one book to another, the lover has changed by counting his bankroll in front of the destitute whites, the older brother ready to kill for his drugs,the younger brother is transformed, the "child", and herself express differently with her stubborn desire and her pain.

Neither her worldly success nor the fuss about the "The Lover" have caused this novelist to deviate an inch from her desire to tell all, about the freshness of desire, the violence of loving, which makes us understand the work. Everything is here, immediate, sensual. "The North China Lover is a brilliant book that is both stunning and diabolical. Highly recommended.
... Read more

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Customer Reviews (61)

Hands down, one of the most important films of the second half of the 20th century
From the opening sequence of a lovers' embrace shot in extreme close-up, intercut with footage of atomic bomb survivors, Alain Resnais creates an asynchronous narrative rhythm in Hiroshima mon amour. A Parisian actress (Emmanuelle Riva) filming an antiwar public service announcement in Hiroshima, has a brief, passionate affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). A vague dialogue between the two nameless lovers provides a glimpse into the loss and regret of their mutually suppressed, unspoken pasts: the actress recounts unsettling images of bomb casualties, as the architect refutes her testament, insisting that she cannot know Hiroshima. After parting to their separate ways for the day, the architect later visits the actress on location, and convinces her to have a drink with him. He is drawn to her melancholy, and seeks validation for their encounter - an intangible souvenir that transcends their short-lived, impossible relationship - an emotional connection. She tells him that Nevers is the home of her youth, a place that she no longer visits, and gradually begins to reveal the events surrounding the loss of her true love, a German soldier, during the final days of occupied France. They are kindred spirits, bound together by personal shame and guilt of survival, and an overwhelming sense that they can never go home again (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's White. It is through their affair that the memory of her beloved is reawakened. In essence, the architect is the catalyst: the receptive soul who guides her through the painful, introspective path that leads to closure.

Alain Resnais retains the radical narrative structure of Marguerite Duras' screenplay, yet achieves a distinctly personal tome on war, guilt, and atonement in Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais' incorporation of unstructured, elliptical chronology creates a sense of atemporality and perpetuity. The lovers emerge after their tryst from a hotel named New Hiroshima, reinforcing the theme of irretrievable history: figuratively, the lost, old Hiroshima that the actress has never (and cannot) known. The repeated dialogue, documentary footage of victims, antiwar protest banners, and flashbacks of Nevers, provide a seamless fusion of the past coexisting with the present. Moreover, the actress' tangential narrative, recounting her nervous breakdown, and her interchanged references to the Japanese architect as her lost German lover, further dissolve the visual linearity of the flashback sequence. This results in a film that is chronologically obscure, a reflection of the toll of personal memories - of how the past subtly, but invariably, affects us - and forever alters our behavior. Hiroshima mon amour is a highly stylized, tightly interwoven tale of lost love, a uniquely realized story of collective conscience: of regret and survival, loss and reconstruction...of nations and people.

Review of Hiroshima Mon Amour
Beautifully filmed romance of a French actress andJapanese artitecht in post war and rebuilt Hiroshima.

Fantastic Movie
One of the best movies I've seen recently. I was stunned after I watched it. The writing was amazing, the acting was breathtaking, the cinematography was stunning. In short, a fantastic film.

Misguided, to say the least
The Bottom Line:

A film that seems more like a project from film school than something people would still praise a half-century after its release, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a bizarre combination of romantic narrative and documentary about the atomic bombwhich fails completely to find a compelling reason for its own existence; one of those films that people praise primarily because it's different, without looking to see if there's anything of substance behind the iconoclasm of the director, this is a film that should be viewed only by those who wish to study the cinematic equivalent of a dish which combines candy corn and foie gras.

2/4

Sleeping with the Enemy
"Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a groundbreaking French New Wave movie. It begins with the French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) passionately making love.... then it cuts to the horrors of the atomic bomb. The viewer goes from the boudoir's pleasures to war's pain. It's a daring,powerful,opening sequence, and probably not something likely to be seen in the movie theater nowadays,let alone an art house one.

"Hiroshima Mon Amour",Alan Resnais' masterpiece, has a non-linear sense of time. The French actress is in Japan in the '60s to make an antiwar film. Though she's married, she carries on a brief,passionate affair with a married Japanese architect. Not only does marriage divide them,but culture and the memories of war. The actress reminisces about her brief affair with a German soldier in Nevers (the name is fitting) during WWII. She is deeply pained and conflicted.

"Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a meditative movie about the nature of forbidden love. While "sleeping with the enemy" is used for titillation in recent films like Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" and Ang Lee's "Lust Caution",Resnais sees the Frenchwoman's affair as a jumping-off point to look into its deeper implications. It brings a whole new meaning to the '60s motto "make love,not war." ... Read more