Name: The Lover
Rating: 3.708791208791209 (91 reviews)
ISBN: 9781101907931

Marguerite Duras

Rachel Kushner

The story of an affair between a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover.

Wartime Notebooks ; Practicalities

The Lover

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.

Saigon, 1930s: a poor French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society. A sensational international bestseller and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, The Lover is disturbing, erotic and masterly. This is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between the lovers and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

march🐇

Leer a la director hablar de ella en tercera persona, relatando a una mujer que ya no existe de un tiempo que no puede olvidar y crecer con ese contraste de lo que dejaste por volver a tu realidad, por cada dia que pasaba con el ella envejecia mas, lo que decidimos amar se queda por siempre.

Santiago Alejandro Crime

It is truly embarrassing how long it took me to read this

gingy :3

jess

love that seethes to its demise, is surely a love that never is condonable. for love is illogical in nature, and despite the atrocities that aligns its signs, the burning passion and desire triumphs any logical sensibilities. heart-wrenching, nostalgic, class-divided love.. she gave her all, despite knowing she scathes herself offering it to one who doesn't deserve her, alas, as she faced the formless sea, she wept, her first and final, uncontrollable tears. the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of that man and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea. the waves console her, and soon, she starts to write again.

I don't know how to feel about this book and I don't think I ever will.

good kind of weird. sometimes too weird. very stylistically interesting but a drag at parts when she starts rambling, but i suppose that is to be expected. 

Cathy Trình

Antonia Folch

In prewar Indochina during the last days of colonialism, a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl initiates herself into a world of passion and lust, of abandon and undying love, through her love affair with a Chinese man

Trever

I don't know why the writing style didn't bother me more than it did. Usually the first person present tense with that staccato-like thing bothers me, but it really fit the narrative here. That aspect reminded me of the part of  Cat's Eye that I've read, but I feel like Atwood is too controlled to be able to pull it off. Duras experiments with style and voice, where Atwood follows a fairly traditional structure. (Not to say I don't like Atwood, just not that novel because of the voice.) The story itself isn't that interesting, but the style manages to hook you anyway.

Set in prewar Indochina, this novel tells the story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover

Angbeen Abbas

wow this book HURT. idk what to even say about it because i feel so floored. lots of it doesn’t hold up too well in the 21st century, but still loved it and thought it was wonderfully written

The Lover Wartime Notebooks ; Practicalities

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