The North China Lover

Name: The North China Lover
Rating: 1 (1 reviews)
Author: Marguerite Duras
ISBN: 9781565840430

by Marguerite Duras

1.0

(1 ratings)

240 pages1992New PressISBN 9781565840430

FictionHistoricalLiteraryBiographical

About this book

Hailed in France as "an incomparable pleasure", Marguerite Duras's newest novel is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of her adolescence that have shaped her work. Far more daring and truthful than any book she has written before, it emphasizes the tough realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed. An instant number-one bestseller in France, The North China Lover both shocks and entrances its readers. Initially written as notes toward a filmscript for The Lover, the book has the grainy, filmic qualities of a documentary. Gone are the romantic and nostalgic readings of the past. Here are the humiliations and passions of the poverty-ridden world in which Duras grew up: the intense sexuality of the young women who were her friends and classmates, a group of adolescents impatient for the experiences of adulthood while still caught up in the conflicts of childhood. For all who have admired Duras's previous work, here is an exciting and unexpected reading of her past - a work the French critics called a return to "the Duras of the great books and the great days."

Publication Details

Publisher: New Press
Published: 1992
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781565840430
Language: en

About Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony. Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her three children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subsequent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period. At 17, Marguerite went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in law. This she soon abandoned to concentrate on political sciences, and then law. After completing her studies, she became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party). In the late 1930s she worked for the French government office representing the colony of Indochina. During the war, from 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to Bergen-Belsen for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Marguerite, just 84 lbs). In 1943 she changed her surname to Duras, the name of a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located. She is the author of m