Volume 32, Number 11 · June 27, 1985
Saigon Mon Amour
By Gabriele Annan
The Lover
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray
Pantheon, 117 pp., $11.95
Marguerite Duras is very much a member of the old French avant-garde. She published her first novel in 1943, wrote her first film script—Hiroshima mon amour—in 1959, and directed her first film in 1969. In 1968 she was a senior member of the writers' and students' revolutionary committee. So it is quite surprising that her latest novel was a runaway success in France last year, French readers being notoriously anxious to be on with the new. L'Amant appeared in the dead holiday month of August and is barely long enough to last through an afternoon on the beach. All the same, it quickly sold 60,000 copies and headed the best-seller list for months. In style and mood—the first cinematographic, the second a kind of dreamy melancholy streaked with anger—it is not so different from her previous work. Why did it do so sensationally well?
Review, 2180 words
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