The Sub Rosa reading group will meet Saturday, February 28 at 6:30 PM for a discussion on The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Books are currently in stock and discounted 15%
The Lover (L’Amant, 1985) by Marguerite Duras is a semi-autobiographical novella about a forbidden affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1930s colonial Indochina, exploring themes of memory, desire, class, and colonialism through spare, evocative prose. The story, framed as a retrospective look by an older Duras, details the intense, transactional relationship that awakens the girl’s sexuality and sets her on a path to becoming a writer, while also touching on her dysfunctional family life and the oppressive atmosphere of the era.
“The Lover, Duras’s forty-eighth work, was published in France in 1984; the English translation arrived in the United States a year later. If the book, at just over a hundred pages, reads like the hazy, disconnected musings of a seventy-year-old writer looking at faded snapshots of her past, that’s because it is. When Duras claimed that the novel was entirely autobiographical, it became something of an international sensation.”
—The Paris Review
“In ”The Lover,” which came out to critical acclaim and popular success last year in France, Miss Duras indeed achieves a writing so distilled, so close to the confounding nature of passion that it almost defies translation into a rational scheme or summary. At the same time, it’s a writing so direct, so precise and unreticent, that it seems as if the novelist is telling us, perhaps for the first time, the simple truth… It is this unsentimental, passionate sensibility that infuses ”The Lover” with its compressed intensity.”
—New York Times
Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was a highly influential French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker known for her minimalist style and exploration of love, memory, and trauma. Raised in French Indochina, her childhood shaped famous works like The Lover (1984), which won the Prix Goncourt, and the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour. Duras was one of France’s most important and prolific writers.
Born Marguerite Donnadieu in 1914 in what was then French Indochina, she went to Paris in 1931 to study at the Sorbonne. During WWII she was active in the Resistance, and in 1945 she joined the Communist Party. Duras wrote many novels, plays, films, and essays during her lifetime. She is perhaps best known for her internationally bestselling novel The Lover, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She died in Paris in 1996.