The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. to get this book the ravishing of lol stein marguerite duras is additionally useful. This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:Īvailable in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. ( pre-recorded books for sale too) stay connected to loved ones. She often moved away from the structure and style of traditional fiction in favour of a more abstract approach, making her one of the most influential and innovative authors of the 20th century.įind out everything you need to know about The Lover in a fraction of the time! Marguerite Duras was a French writer, playwright and filmmaker. The Lover was a commercial and critical success: the novel won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984, and it has sold almost three million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. They are eventually separated when the young girl is forced to go back to France, where she will once again encounter her lover many years later. This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Lover by Marguerite Duras, an autobiographical novel which tells the story of a teenage girl who embarks on a forbidden relationship with a wealthy Chinese man twelve years her senior. Box office: 0131-248 4848.Unlock the more straightforward side of The Lover with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! You appreciate it as a good-looking experiment, but it’s one that keeps the lid on its passions.Īt the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 3 February. With its lively modern-day soundtrack of stripped-back French and English-language pop (including LCD Soundsystem, Timber Timbre and Beirut), it has frequent bursts of expressive choreography, not least between the battling brothers, but also low-voltage moments that are too reflective to suggest very much is at stake. Her 27-year-old lover, the son of prominent Chinese businessman, mimics Humbert’s obsessive attachment to his nameless paramour. (The lighting by Emma Jones turning the girl sepia in the “muddy light of the river”.) We are kept at one remove the presentation cool and controlled, elegant rather than wild.Īdventurous though the collision of forms is, the production is often neither dynamic enough for dance nor dramatic enough for theatre. On the other hand, Marguerite Duras chooses to tell the narrative from the point of view of the young protagonist, a 15-year-old girl with a dysfunctional family and lower-class background. There’s little heat in this tale of physical desire, despite the protagonists’ feverish passions and the humidity of the Mekong. What it fails to do, in particular, is raise the emotional temperature. We look from the outside in at an affair that remains enigmatic a fuzzy recollection of teenage impressions, intense, out of reach, unexplained.Īmy Hollinshead and Kieran Brown in The Lover.
A collaboration between choreographer Fleur Darkin and director Jemima Levick, using the combined forces of Scottish Dance Theatre, the Stellar Quines company and the Lyceum, the production uses dancers to turn the audience into voyeurs. So there is a logic to presenting this stage adaptation not as a straight play but as a dance-theatre hybrid. He asks her whether she is attracted to him only for his money it isn’t quite her reason, but it’s as good as any. He is prone to weeping and feels oppressed by his father. He is Chinese and the son of a millionaire. Whether because of her age at the time or the passing decades since, Duras gives us the scantest details about the girl’s lover. “I’m used to people looking at me,” she writes, knowing her attractiveness is not in what she says or does, but in what others see in her.Īnd it works two ways. Looking back at her 15-year-old self living in what was French Indochina, when she engaged in an illicit affair with a man 12 years her senior, the author sees a girl whose sexual desirability is in her very presence. T here’s a theme in Marguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novel about the objectifying gaze.