She wrote about her experience in three works: The Sea Wall, The Lover, and The North China Lover. Translation Review Praise for Marguerite Durass international bestseller, The Lover 'Powerful, authentic, completely successful. A section that does not appear in any other version of the book.īarbara Bray's English translation won the Scott Moncrieff Prize and PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1986.ĭuras published The Lover when she was 70, fifty-five years after she met Léo, the Chinese man of her story (she never revealed his surname). 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.
It has been translated into 43 languages and was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt. This second version also contains more humor than the original. The Lover (French: LAmant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les Éditions de Minuit. 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. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair.įor her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it isn't until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings. He strikes up a conversation with the girl she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine.Ĭompelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. She attracts the attention of a 27-year-old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. In 1929, a 15-year-old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc, to her boarding school in Saigon. Urn:oclc:851765130 Scandate 20100526025857 Scanner against the backdrop of French Indochina, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man. The picture of the ferry and the map of the Mekong River are important contextual pieces to look at because Duras.
Product Description An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of. To contextualize The Lover, I have included a picture of the ferry, a map of the Mekong River, as well as a picture from a scene taken from the movie version of the novel, and a photo of the Japanese occupation. Collins The Lover by Marquerite Duras is a well written book, structured like dreams and memories rather than. Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's. 110 of 115 people found the following review helpful. Urn:oclc:record:1150289173 Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier loverdura00dura Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2n59777s Isbn 0060975210ĩ780060975210 Lccn 85045632 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Openlibrary_edition 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. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 16:59:48 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA117814 Boxid_2 CH102901 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1st HarperPerennial ed.