The Lover

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 Inside Flap onal best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, <b>The Lover</b> has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984.<br><br>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.<br><br>Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of <b>The Lover</b> 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. "An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl."-Boston Herald"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 Marguerite Duras is the author of many novels and screenplays, including the film script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour . One of France's most important literary figures, Duras died in Paris in 1996. Read more