Title: The Lover - Marguerite Duras - book
Summary :
Goncourt Prize 1984
"In The Lover, Marguerite Duras takes up in a confidential tone the images and themes that haunt her entire work. Her readers will then be able to go down this great river with its Asian slowness and follow the novelist in all the meanders of the delta, in the humidity of the rice paddies, in the shadowy secrets where she developed the repetitive and obsessive incantation of her books, her films, her theater. In the literal sense, Duras has here returned to her sources, to her "fundamental scene": that moment when, around 1930, on a ferry crossing a branch of the Mekong, a very rich Chinese man approaches a little fifteen-year-old white girl whom he will fall in love with. The most beautiful passages of The Lover must be read aloud. This will better perceive the rhythm, the scansion, the intimate breathing of the prose, which are the subtle secrets of the writer. From the very first lines of the story, Duras's art and expertise burst forth, her freedoms, her challenges, the conquests of thirty years to succeed in writing this light, neutral, rapid and haunting language at the same time, capable of capturing all the nuances, of moving at the exact speed of thought and images. An extreme realism (we see the river; we hear the cries of Cholon behind the shutters in the Chinese man's bachelor apartment), and at the same time a sort of waking dream, a dream life, a nightmare of life: this prose like no other is of tremendous effectiveness. At once modernity, the true one, and singularities that are beyond time, styles, fashion. (François Nourissier) Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) received the Prix Goncourt in 1984 for this novel. Translated into 35 countries, it has sold 2,400,000 copies in all editions combined.
