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.

I started reading this book several months ago and now have slowly wandered my way to the end. It is a book best read an essay at a time. Otherwise it seems to jump around too much. A movie in the Seattle International Film Festival, "No Place to Go (Die Unberuehrbare)" reawakened my interest in the book. In the movie, a leftist writer struggles to discover how to survive after the Berlin Wall has fallen and all her hopes for a socialist Germany have been dashed. She has become an anachronism moving across the landscape with nowhere to go. This book is much lighter in tone, a series of good-humored irony-laden essays about life in Germany in 1989 and 1990 in the absence of the legendary Wall. Schneider points out various paradoxes such as West Berliners becoming less enthusiastic about the Wall coming down as the probability of its demise approaches. Also, the book is full of interesting historical footnotes, such as that most of the Wall has disappeared as people have hacked off bigger and littler pieces of it as personal momentos and much-in-demand tourist items. For someone as little aware of recent German history as me, this book was very informative and leaves me wanting to read more about recent German history to find out what has happened since 1991.

This completely frank, thought-provoking, and often wryly humorous account of life in Berlin before the fall of the Wall will go straight to your heart with its fascinating stories and tales from both sides of the Divided City. With poignancy and warmth, the author creates believable characters who adhere to their own truths, not necessarily the expectations of the reader. The personable, unnamed speaker in this first person narrative is a writer trying to create the story of a man "caught in a back-and-forth motion over the Wall, like a soccer goalie in an instant replay, always taking the same dive to miss the same ball." Virtually all the Berliners we meet here--from both East and West--are in the same situation as the unfortunate goalie, as they, too, go back and forth, repeatedly mistaking the moves of people from the other "side," misinterpreting signals, and often, in their ignorance, failing to "get it."

The author provides an amazingly complete, though somewhat sanitized, picture of the Wall-jumpers--not those poor souls who were brutally machine-gunned by Wall guards, but people like the speaker who come and go across the Wall with relative impunity because they do not call attention to themselves. And Schneider is quick to point out that most of the East Berliners are fairly satisfied with their lives, which are depicted with much warmth, as families and friends spend a great deal of time with each other, undistracted by the responsibilities of "freedom." The fascinating philosophical discussions and personal revelations that occur among friends from both sides may sweep away your preconceptions about life in Berlin, as they did mine, and you may find yourself reevaluating your thinking about society and politics in general, and about Germany, in particular.