Set in French-occupied Indochina during the 1930s, it recounts an illicit love affair between an adolescent school girl and the suave son of a rich Chinese businessman. Duras claimed it to be autobiographical. Perhaps. No matter it is lyrical, erotic, precocious, evocative. Secreted in a small room, traffic noises creeping through the shutters, this unlikely couple indulge themselves in forbidden love. A slender finally-crafted jewel.
Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.
'Rarely have I read a novel so flawlessly written.' Spectator
'Very beautiful, highly intelligent, enjoyable and original.' Sunday Times
'Perfect, a tour de force !accessible in the way Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel are accessible!dealing successfully with the strong themes of erotic love and death.' New York Times Book Review
'A spectacular success.' Edmund White
Author
About Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras was one of Europe's most distinguished writers. The author of many novels and screenplays, she is perhaps best known outside France for her filmscript Hiroshima Mon Amour and her Prix Goncourt-winning novel THE LOVER, also filmed. Her other books include LA DOLEUR, BLUE EYES BLACK HAIR, SUMMER RAIN and THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. Born in Indochina in 1914, Marguerite Duras died in 1996.
