", One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. Later that week he picks her up from school to show her where he lives, and from there a sexual relationship ensues. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. I love the way it deals with memory and loss. To remember is to regain and to lose, all at once. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2020, Exciting story! It has been translated into 43 languages and was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt. There's a problem loading this menu at the moment.

Top subscription boxes – right to your door, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Hence this positive review, written by one who loves / hates Asia, but will always return. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2020, Exciting story! I picked this up on kindle for £1.99. They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles. They realize that "a future together is unthinkable" because she is scheduled to return to Paris soon, and he is to make an arranged marriage with a Chinese heiress. From the outset, it’s clear that Hélène is unsure of her own identity. ( Log Out /  Please try again. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2019. I really loved and admired this short novel, but don’t take my word for it: The Lover was awarded the French Goncourt Prize in 1984 and it features in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The following day, he waits for her outside her boarding school and takes her to the room in the Chinese quarter that he uses for entertaining mistresses. But to write the story is to undo the real one. The Lover (French: L'Amant) is a 1992 erotic drama film produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. I can overlook the cover. Customers who read this book have also read. A quiet book, dynamic and complex. Mar guerite Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914 and was one of . The organization gave the original film an MPAA rating of NC-17. [9] However, the filmmakers were required to clear all production storyboards with officials before they could be filmed, and an official remained on set at all times. Barbara Bray's English translation won the Scott Moncrieff Prize and PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1986. This day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels. [15], Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film, calling it "something of a triumph" and a "tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental" film that was "produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center." Duras writes a semi-autobiographical novel of a young girl in 1930s French Indochina who falls in love, or better said becomes the object of the love of a young, wealthy Chinese man. The primary characters are known only as the Young Girl and the Chinese man. 9/10. But things did not go well: her father quickly returned to France, where he died soon after, and her mother, a school teacher, made a bad property investment in the colony, which  mired them in poverty. Her lover is portrayed by actor Tony Leung Ka-fai.[4][3].

There are two published versions of The Lover: one written in the form of an autobiography, without any superimposed temporal structures, as the young girl narrates in first-person; the other, called The North China Lover and released in conjunction with the film version of the work, is in film script form, in the third person, with written dialogue and without internal monologue. For Duras, who seemed to sample from every tragedy the world could concoct, it manifests in tone. Thanks, James. Hélène now becomes aware of her own power. Annaud and his collaborators have got all of the physical details just right, but there is a failure of the imagination here; we do not sense the presence of real people behind the attractive facades of the two main actors. And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them. Duras brings this to us in her treatment of time: as malleable, as object; to be held up and looked at as facets and contradictions all at once. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. I can’t see any others I could have been wearing, so I’m wearing them. However, the atmosphere around the Mekong river was convincingly portrayed. Intense, can be difficult, but rewarding. There’s never any centre to it. The government welcomed the crew, providing them with a governmental helicopter for use during filming. It was a ber6 short book but it was very captivating and made my visit to The Love House very meaningful. However, the atmosphere around the Mekong river was convincingly portrayed. He felt the role of the Young Girl was "altogether too complex for the inexperienced March to do more than simply embody. [9] In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he stated that the "best colonial hotel" offered "rats as big as this running through the corridors, spiders everywhere, and no air conditioning, of course. But there were flashes of my own love and life in the East. . Hélène is returning to boarding school in Saigon from a holiday and is crossing the Mekong Delta by ferry. In The Lover, director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us the sweating and writhing without the spontaneity and surprise. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. The Lover (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. As in other colonies, the official presence of the French in Southeast Asia (1860s to 1954) provoked cultural production from both indigenous and colonial populations. And she knows that men look at her and desire her. The Lover (French: L'Amant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les Éditions de Minuit. Duras says herself: I’ve written a good deal about the members of my family, but then they were still alive, my mother and my brothers. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. But no, that wasn’t it. Something went wrong. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. But it wasn’t. It was also adapted for film in 1992. The most haunting aspect of such memory, of it existing as a written text, as it does in The Lover, is perhaps nowhere so perfectly summed up as in what Duras says herself: The story of my life doesn’t exist. There was a problem loading your book clubs. There is a violent, opium-smoking older brother, and a timid younger brother. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. A constant companion novel throughout my life. But the story is dramatically not that interesting. Paperback. In the first version of Avital Inbar's Hebrew translation (Maariv publishers,1986), there is (page 11) an excerpt, dictated by Marguerite Duras on the phone to her translator. I haven’t got this one yet but I loved The Sailor from Gibraltar so I must get round to it. The critic for Time Out London thought its "sombre quality dignifies an otherwise shoddily directed movie" that is "basically a melancholic piece about the remembrance of times, places and passions lost." It does not run smoothly but emerges, moment by moment, crystalline and glittering. The way Duras writes the image of the girl on the deck, of the crystalline moment that went unrecorded in any photograph but is nonetheless the image the entirety of The Lover hinges on, and it itself is a lesson in memory and loss on the level of every sentence: It might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter.