Book Review: The Lover by Marguerite Duras
I’m currently reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras, a book recommended by my creative writing teacher. I must say it is beautifully written, poignant and haunting.
An excerpt from Amazon’s description:
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.
As all the reviews on Amazon suggest, it is the way the book is written that is most powerful - the images the author uses to describe, the words she chooses to evoke emotion around incidents and people. There’s a lyrical quality to the writing and the story is mysterious and subversive, set in colonial Indo-China, principally Vietnam, in the 1930s. I was quite surprised that it was first published only relatively recently in 1984.
There are so many good books I’ve read but there are only a few which really move me and I’ve got to say this is one of them.
Has Duras written anything else?
Apparently she has but from what I read, ‘The Lover’ was the peak of her career, the other books more like precursors to that one. I’d like to check them out anyway.
I’ve just finished reading The Human Stain by Phillip Roth. The movie starred Anthony Hopkis and Nicole Kidman. I haven’t seen the movie but from what I hear it’s nothing to write home about. Roth has written a trilogy and this book was the finale. You mgith find it interesting if you’re exploring different writing styles. His use of punctuation can be turgid - the story’s a good one if nothing else.
I’m quite enjoying reading “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s about a deranged Baptist
minister taking his family from Georgia to the Belgian Congo in 1959. I was interested to read a review of
the book in last week’s’s SMH (Sat). Barbara Kingslover is an excellent writer.
I would like to read “The Lover”.
Now that I’m a member of the library, I’ll have to look for some of Barbara Kingsolver’s books there - the one you’re reading sounds really interesting. I didn’t see the review on Saturday - was it in Spectrum?
The write-up was in the SMH a couple of weeks ago. I have kept it so will show you. My favourite book of hers
is “The Prodigal Summer”. That was so easy to read and a “can’t put down” book.