Not easily swayed by what sounds in synopses like soap opera, the hater (Akhil Sharma) criticized Duras to the incredulity of the postmodern feminist critic (Kate Zambreno) and the bemusement of the French New Yorker editor (Françoise Mouly): Duras's language was "enigmatic due to grammar and… awkwardness" the "lack of wisdom in the reflection" felt "unearned" he was "not sure what to take away." The younger novelist (Catherine Lacey) was good-natured, but skeptical. As in life, the French person seemed like she had it right, and the man was a contrarian hater. The participants were as follows: a funny, well-versed French New Yorker editor (female), who played the role of expert a good-natured younger novelist (female), who sort of played the role of moderator a postmodern feminist critic and novelist (female), who played the role of die-hard fan and a respected writer who recently published a novel with a similarly closely autobiographical bent and even more recently was announced as one of the recipients of a very prestigious arts fellowship (male). I realized I had never encountered a person who didn't love this book until last week, when I went to see a panel discuss it in a performance space on the Upper West Side, also in honor of its 30th anniversary. ") But wait, there's more: The Lover is one of those rare sensual, secret-love-affair best-sellers that is also stylistically rigorous, or challenging, or at least worthy of the vague but still meaningful literary designation. (The headline for the 1985 People review of the novel: " France's Marguerite Duras Unveils a Secret Love Affair 55 Years Later in Her Sensual Best-Seller. Before I read it, I understood the book to be about a poor 15-year-old French girl's coming-of-age via an illicit affair with a wealthy 27-year-old Chinese man in pre-war Indochina, which is appealing for several obvious reasons. It was inevitable that I would eventually read The Lover, if not this week then at least sometime during my tumultuous 20s, a time when sexual awakening is distant enough to not be humiliating, but recent enough to justify a fixation. It won France's biggest literary prize and sold over a million copies in more than 40 languages.
She called the book "shit" and "train-station literature" and said she wrote it while she was drunk. Its author, the Marguerite Duras, wrote it when she was 71, after a long career during which she influenced the new French novel, an experimental literary movement that, like French New Wave, rejected traditional narrative concerns like plot and character development. It's more of a memoir, heavy on the memory, which means it's more subjective than factually accurate. Published in French in 1984 and in English the following year, The Lover is often called an autobiographical novel, though that's not really what it is.
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