When reading The Lover I canвЂ™t help but feel the gale-force power of an artist who has been on edge of death and who will continue to revisit that edge.Д®arlier this year Symphony Space, in honor of the 30th anniversary of The Lover, hosted a panel discussion featuring Catherine Lacey, Kate Zambreno, Akhil Sharma, and Francoise Mouly. Several years after the publication of The Lover, Duras fell into a coma that lasted for months (she recovered). Blue.вЂќДЄutobiographical novels are sometimes associated with youth, but The Lover was published in 1984, when Duras was 70, which is to say it was a work that arrived late in her career as a writer-and also late in her career as a serious alcoholic, though The Lover was written during a period of relatively new sobriety. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand.

In every reading, I have been stunned still by language that is at once crystalline and enigmatic: вЂњThe light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. IвЂ™ve already told my mother: ThatвЂ™s what I want to do-write.вЂќ In my most recent reading, I was moved to consider the act of self-narratizing, of trying to lay the pieces of oneвЂ™s story down on the page and reckoning with what shows up, and all the confrontations and evasions that tend to accompany such an act. In an even later reading, The Lover seemed to be most urgently a story about a young woman awakening to artistic desire: вЂњI want to write. In teaching the book, the conversation often looped back to the structure, which is guided by image and repetition, a kind of dream-logic, as opposed to conventional narrative patterns. In subsequent readings, I was unnerved by the torturous relationship between the narrator and her elder brother, вЂњthe child killer of the night,вЂќ and the affair, though still deeply compelling, became tainted with painful disbalances of power in both directions: age, experience, class, economics, race. The desperate, romantic, operatic sweep of the final lines, an ending made all the more luminous because it is tempered with DurasвЂ™s ruthlessly truthful powers of observation. The first time I read it, on the edge of love myself, I was swept up in the eroticism of the affair between the teenage narrator and a man in his twenties. Through the years, I have come to think of The Lover as a lake without a bottom, or perhaps more accurately with a bottom that is ever-shifting: each dive yields an altered and enriched understanding of the topography, and there is the sense that you could dive forever and never grasp that topography absolutely. I do, however, have a very small group of books I continually revisit, The Lover chief among them. Maybe driven by this knowledge, or maybe because I got something of a late start as a reader, I am not a chronic re-reader of novels, preferring instead to keep bounding into the unknown. There are so many books that, over the course of my lifetime, I will never read. Again in Boston and again in Maine, near winter.

The fourth was in Baltimore, in preparation to teach the novel. The third was in a French literature class in graduate school. The plot isn't much to talk about but that may be besides the point.The second encounter was in Florida, in an attempt to recover from the first. On the other hand, the story is paper thin. It's more cinematic than the classic Emmanuelle or other pornographic B-movies. It's got beautiful naked people but it's not quite overt softcore porn. This is a solid example of the sub-genre of exotic erotica. Her friend Helene Lagonelle is the only other white girl in the school. He gives her a ride to her boarding school and starts an erotic affair. She tells him that she's 17 despite being only 15 and a half. On a Mekong river crossing, the girl meets a rich jobless globetrotting playboy Chinaman (Tony Ka Fai Leung). The family is running out of money for him to steal. She is repatriating him to France after stealing from an opium den. Pierre is their mother's favorite despite being a thief and a bully. In French colonial Indochina, a French girl (Jane March) has two older brothers, Pierre and Paul.

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