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The Lover

Marguerite Duras,

Maxine Hong Kingston (Introduction),

Barbara Bray (Translator)

Start date: March 1, 2017

Finish date: May 31, 2017

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Jan 05, 2017 Rosemary rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books

Poetic and very unsettling, this novel switches from first to third person while always being from the point of view of a poor ethnically French girl/woman who, before the age of 16, becomes the lover of a rich ethnically Chinese man, both living in Vietnam. The closest parallel I can think of is Lolita. The stories are very different but neither book is the scandalous erotica that one might expect from their reputations. This one focuses as much on the heroine's dysfunctional family as on the a ...more

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Apr 11, 2015 Sam rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, books-of-2016

I think part of why I didn't enjoy this novel was because my expectations going in were not even close to the reality. I tend to like to go into books mostly blind, which is great most of the time, but not so much when you're expecting a tender love story between people from two different worlds, and instead you get a 15-year-old taking on a 27-year-old lover mostly for his money.

The prose is beautiful, there's no denying that Duras was a talented author. I did enjoy the descriptions of her fam ...more

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Jan 17, 2016 Maia rated it really liked it

worth reading, intense. Read in french, might have missed bits. The missing-chunks-out style is maddening at first and she spends one quarter getting onto the topic, but stick with it, it works in the end

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