The Lover by Marguerite Duras Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Lover
Book Review: fabulous
Summary: 5 Stars
I've read this book at least two dozen times....
I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes poetic writing.
There are lines and paragraphs in this book that are verging on sublime.
Book Review: interesting effort but hard to love
Summary: 3 Stars
I didn't love The Lover, but as a fan of things Vietnamese I'm glad I read this semi-autobiographical story of Duras growing up in French Indochina. The loose, episodic narrative--about a teenage girl, her unstable family, and her older Chinese lover--requires some comfort with ambiguity as well as patience to put the pieces of the plot together. The narrator somehow manages to be emotionally overwrought and indifferent at the same time; an American reader is likely to find her exceptionally French. But to Duras' credit, The Lover is knowingly brief and often poetic; it feels something like an experimental but successful prose poem.Book Review: ummmm, what'd i miss?
Summary: 2 Stars
ok. i'm lost. i just read the book, THE LOVER, and i can't figure it out. mind you, i read a lot. at the same time i read THE LOVER i am reading pearl s. buck IMPERIAL WOMAN, and a book by barbara samuel. i am studying A COURSE IN MIRACLES and i like to study anything off the beaten track.....i read, and study, extensively. and you know what? i don't get THE LOVER. first love. ok. i had a couple of those, but i still don't relate....i am lost by the tenses...what is happening and when? then i don't understand indo-china. sorry. i don't know much more about this area of the world than what pearl is telling me in IMPERIAL WOMAN circa mid 1800's. EXLAIN PLEASE> oh, add in what i have recently researched and know about the boxing day tsumani....that is the extent of knowledge i have about this area of the world. i can't know what i haven't lived. explain it please...for example, what is the real meaning of white people in THE LOVER (rare?)? explain. what land does her mother lose and why? what is her brother, the older, all about....? the whole book i wait for clarification. i truly want to understand. so much that i ask my 16 year old daughter to read it and help me "get it"....so much that i go on amazon and read the reviews to see what other readers pulled from the book. i want to get it...what'd i miss? i spent a whole sunday afternoon on this...what was the point? i don't feel it....jfBook Review: wowed
Summary: 5 Stars
A little book, barely 100 pages, packed with so much emotion and imagery i don't even know how to describe it. It is intense, in a way i haven't read in a while. Technically it is a story of a very poor French teenager, in Vietnam in the 1920's, who takes as her lover a wealthy Chinese man. Character-wise, he doesn't seem much more than a boy himself, though he is in his late 20's. But we get so much more information about the girl's life than we do about her affair. We hear about her mother, essentially a crazy woman, about both her brothers and their lives and deaths. The girl, who never gives her name, is weirdly detached from everyone but seems to be able to understand people deeply. The descriptions are lush and exotic. It seems to be a novel full of yearning and need.