This is one of those books which captures your total attention and you will never forget it. There is no way to describe it. Beyond the confines of time and space is the only way I can explain it, utterly haunting. It is as if the author is sitting with you, telling you her tale, and you're suspended in a sort of entranced state, not able to cry, not able to smile, not able to rationalize. It's hypnotic. Based on Duras' early life, you can hardly believe this tale to be true. Do people feel such emotions? Could there be a love so strange and haunting as this? Certainly, while I do not believe in some of her viewpoints, I cannot ignore the ingeniousness of her web-weaving tale. You can see this "drifter", waif of a girl wearing the man's fedora, pressing her lips against the glass of the window, you can see her, as an older woman with a "face laid waste" as her lost love confesses that he still loves her and will never stop loving her. In between the illusions of time and space, her memory remains vivid, lucid, yet with a sort of spiritual calm about it. The sort of calm that comes from having overcome the most profound pain. This work is pure genius, I cannot imagine why Americans have not caught onto it.

It's the greatest book and author of this century. It revealed the feeling burried in our hearts for long. It touched our soul by simple words. Each page turned over with the "weep without tears". The picture Marguerite tried to show us is a motionless photo which has been wanned by the history. The story happened in the colonial period again tells us a way to chase for the real love and freeze the love into our mirror.

In this novel, once again, juxtaposed with the intimacy of the characters is their distance, and the incomprehensibility that exists between them. As usual language is a culprit.

A murder is committed in a small French town and as the police turn the tape recorder on, the need to have the "details" of the episode "correct" reveal the murderer's identity.

In the meantime, we find ourselves feasting on the reactions of the town to this event, and the townspeople's natural inclination to huddle together and while worried they will be fingered, hope for it to be a "Stranger" to NOT DESIRE TO KNOW THAT IT IS ONE OF THEM.

The woman who commits the murder lives for years with a completely unsatisfying domestic setting, in a dream world in which she is cut off from the understanding of perhaps herself as well as others..

Duras deftly weaves this page turner. One wants the character of the murderer revealed. The murderer was perhaps ending hypocrisy?

Even as we have language, as we have an "Interpretor" of facts, as we use our own native intelligence and imagination in listening to the police interrogations and the few possible suspects stories, and as we find out what really happened.

It is not so easy to summarize "La Amante Anglaise" (A french play on "English Mint" as well as "English Lover")

Love lost and the yearning of someone after the dream of "essential love" here repeat, in the context of a murder.

Brilliant read.

L'Amante Anglaise is a mystery that leaves you dizzy, it is a gluttonous feast of details and madness. At first it seems to be a murder mystery, then it turns on you and becomes a character study of a madwoman. There are vibrant, rich passages that have you begging to hop inside her head, and escape the flatness of the town. This is escapism in grand form.

"Writing" combines elements of fictional narrative, literary theory, and conversational Q&A all in Duras's recognizable voice. It is a wonderful book allowing readers to experience both Duras's writing process and the finished outcome.

this is the last book by Duras, as she passed away on March 4, 1996. Recommended for anyone who appreciates the spledid bareness of her late style. Her theory of writing, why she wrote, and what compells writers...fascinating, and reads like a meditation.

The beauty of this book is portioned out equally between the skill and dexterity of Hewitt and that of her subjects. Not only does Hewitt walk with ease across the tightrope of autobiography, her entire book is, as a whole, a perfectly balanced affair. It includes the distinct, prismatic effects of each of her selected modern French female autobiographers as she shines a new light on autobiography--but it also includes how each of the autobiographers' lights reflect upon and and influence one another. The book is balanced, as well, in the experiences of the French writers, themselves; Hewitt listens and gives her attention to a wide variety of French females. feminists, anti-feminists, being French in a foreign land, being Foreign in a French land, being lesbian, heterosexual, anti-gender, a black writer, a white writer--Hewitt values the distinct spice each experience adds to the overall genre of autobiography. Although this variety makes Hewitt's book seem to be a superficial sampler of modern feminine French autobiography, nothing can be further from the truth. With concise, yet exciting language, Hewitt sometimes digs so deeply into the experiences of her subjects and how they are novel and unique, this reviewer literally had an urge to go out immediately to the library and spend the rest of her life studying autobiography. This is not to say that Hewitt's book is flawless; no book is. In order to generate her great balance, Hewitt appears to stretch the genre of autobiography too far in order to fit her specifications. In searching for non-white, non-traditionally-gendered and foreign French voices, she included the work of Maryse Conde and Monique Wittig, skilled writers, but unfortunately for Hewitt, not autobiographers. Hewitt breaches the integral attraction/repulsion of autobiography in confusing what are clearly fictions with self-references, and the autobiographical genre. Although there is no clear-cut definition of autobiography, the easiest and most efficient way to discover what is and isn't autobiography is to ask the writer. In these cases, the works of the authors are certainly self-referential, but they are clearly not autobiography. Hewitt addresses these concerns, true, but her justifications for their inclusion in a book about autobiography are not ultimately satisfying. Yet, this book is a gem, filled with fresh insights into the work of the writers she studies and very interesting hypotheses. It is a fairly easy read, clearly digestible for the non-academic, and the readers' knowledge of Hewitt's subjects is not necessary to understand and appreciate this impressive book.

I read that book from a friend recomendation. And I liked a lot. So, I want to have my own book. I highly recommended.

This collection brings together four of Marguerite Duras's plays: La Musica, Eden Cinema, Savannah Bay, and India Song, along with a useful introduction by superb translator, Barbara Bray.

Fans of Duras will recognize her mythic themes at work in each. "La Musica" deals with a couple, who upon divorcing, find that they cannot move on with their lives; their passion is too great; everything else pales in comparison. The ending brings to mind the ending in "Hiroshima, mon amour." In "Eden Cinema", the reader is once again introduced to elements explored in "The Lover" and "The Sea Wall": a mother sinks the family savings into a sizable piece of land that proves not to be arable. The daughter, Suzanne, uses the desire that she stirs in a wealthy Chinese to try to improve the family's fortunes.

"Savannah Bay" recounts a tragic love that actress Madeleine's daughter had for a young man, a love that drove the daughter to suicide in a pact of sorts that was to include her lover, but it is unclear as to whether he followed through with it. "India Song", for all intents and purposes, is a retelling of "The Vice-Consul", this time, though, from the perspective of disembodied voices with their own histories that run parallel to the histories of Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-Consul of Lahore.

All of these plays are written in the searing, very dramatic style Duras was known for and are most interesting when read alongside her other works.

An imaginative and subtle book written with wonderful lucidity. One of the smartest studies of modern French literature.

'The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas' is one of the deepest narratives one could ever write and read.It does not barely investigate over death and the philosophies that might be associated; nor,is there a direct reference that Andesmas is nearing his death. He hopefully waits for his daughter's arrival as the sun starts to set into the abyss.His mind journeys through memories while his body for the last time responses to the skirts of a young girl. As it gets colder by the approaching evening,Andesmas gets closer to death, rehearsed in his short sleeps.Duras' use of symbolism is most evident in this novel.If you have a taste for her earlier writing,you will enjoy 'The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas'.

Let's hope it gets back in to print. Perhaps one of Duras' most overlooked masterpieces set in torrid central Italy, forest fires creep closer to the resort, and mourning mine-searcher's mother awaits night and day the permit to bury her dead son. The senseless waiting and order we construct to hide the shallowness of our lives.

Considerable addition to "The Lover", actually much better. Her notes which include her ideas as to how the book should be filmed are particuarily fascinating.

In 1984, Marguerite Duras won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, for her short novel, "The Lover". That novel told the simple story of an adolescent French girl living in Vietnam in the 1930s. She meets an older Chinese man who becomes her lover. It is a sparely written novel, shifting in time and narrative perspective, often difficult to follow. It is also a novel charged with memory, yearning and erotic feeling.

"The North China Lover", written several years later and published in an English edition in 1992, is a kind of extension of the earlier novel, written with much more detail, inhabiting the interstices of "The Lover". Like its precursor, "The North China Lover" tells a powerful tale of love between the twenty-seven year old Chinese man and the barely teen-aged girl whom he meets on a ferry crossing the Mekong River. Once again, neither the Chinese man nor the girl has a name. However, unlike the earlier novel, many of the other characters are identified and the narrative of "The North China Lover" is considerably more detailed. Originally written as notes for a screenplay of "The Lover", the narrative of "The North China Lover" is episodic, described by one reviewer as having the "grainy, filmic qualities of a documentary." It is also more linear in its story line, easier to follow than the earlier novel, but still characterized by the nouveau roman influences that permeate Marguerite Duras' writing.

"The North China Lover", like its precursor, is a compelling work of memory, eroticism and yearning that, in true Duras style, conflates literary imagination and biography. Read it slowly, languorously savor its eroticism, and let it linger in your mind long after you've closed the book.

This is a haunting story. A totally objectionable storyline ( a love affair between a fourteen year old girl and a twenty something man) is fascinating here. The reader feels for the girl, whose mental age is certainly way beyond her chronological age, and for the man who suffers greatly. A beautifully told tale, very French and elusive in the telling.