L'Amant

Rating:
Summary: Incroyable
Review: << Je crois que du seul enfant aîné ma mère disait : mon enfant. Elle l'appelait quelquefois de cette façon. Des deux autres elle disait : les plus jeunes. De tout cela nous ne disions rien à l'extérieur, nous avions appris à nous taire sur le principal de notre vie, la misère. >>

With such intimate tone Marguerite Duras involves us in the story of her childhood. She, daughter of a poor French family in the colonies (South East Asia) has her first romantic experience with a rich Chinese man.

Class, gender, ethnicity, uprootedness, relationships, all of that mingles to create a narrative that flows full of power and feeling. Both the nameless narratrice and her lover are outsiders in a country that is not really theirs, both share a moment and both have complex lives.

I think anyone who has grown in a home full of conflicts and privations can easily identify with the feelings so passionately set to paper by the author. And anyone else can, too: such is the magic of her prose.

The Éditions de Minuit series is rather minimalistic: no prologue, no notes. None are needed.

Rating:
Summary: The best book I've ever read
Review: It's the greatest book and author of this century. It revealed the feeling burried in our hearts for long. It touched our soul by simple words. Each page turned over with the "weep without tears". The picture Marguerite tried to show us is a motionless photo which has been wanned by the history. The story happened in the colonial period again tells us a way to chase for the real love and freeze the love into our mirror.

Rating:
Summary: Pure Art
Review: This autobiographical novel is pure art. I read it in French first, but the translation loses nothing of the suspended breath of emotion so often found in French literature. There is nothing overwritten in the prose nor overstated in the story. The tale of a girl's forbidden passion is breathtaking in its simplicity and poignant in its retelling by the woman now grown old.--Sophie Simonet, ACT OF LOVE, romantic suspense novel (Fictionwise)

Rating:
Summary: Beyond the confines of time & space - utterly haunting.
Review: This is one of those books which captures your total attention and you will never forget it. There is no way to describe it. Beyond the confines of time and space is the only way I can explain it, utterly haunting. It is as if the author is sitting with you, telling you her tale, and you're suspended in a sort of entranced state, not able to cry, not able to smile, not able to rationalize. It's hypnotic. Based on Duras' early life, you can hardly believe this tale to be true. Do people feel such emotions? Could there be a love so strange and haunting as this? Certainly, while I do not believe in some of her viewpoints, I cannot ignore the ingeniousness of her web-weaving tale. You can see this "drifter", waif of a girl wearing the man's fedora, pressing her lips against the glass of the window, you can see her, as an older woman with a "face laid waste" as her lost love confesses that he still loves her and will never stop loving her. In between the illusions of time and space, her memory remains vivid, lucid, yet with a sort of spiritual calm about it. The sort of calm that comes from having overcome the most profound pain. This work is pure genius, I cannot imagine why Americans have not caught onto it.