Customer Reviews

Amant (L')

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This autobiographical novel is pure art. I read it in French first, but the translation loses nothing of the suspended breath of emotion so often found in French literature. There is nothing overwritten in the prose nor overstated in the story. The tale of a girl's forbidden passion is breathtaking in its simplicity and poignant in its retelling by the woman now grown old.--Sophie Simonet, ACT OF LOVE, romantic suspense novel (Fictionwise)

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.