BOOKS

L'amour

by Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Kazim Ali & Libby Murphy, Introduction by Kazim Ali

Open Letter Books, 2013
112 pages, 5.5 x 8.5"
$12.95, Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-934824-79-5

Purchase from: Open Letter Books / IndieBound

From the publisher: A man—the traveler—arrives in the seaside town of S. Thala with the intent to abandon his present, and instead finds himself abruptly reintroduced to his past. Through his subsequent interactions with “her,” the woman to whom he was briefly engaged as a young man over twenty years ago, and “him,” the man who walks and keeps watch over “her,” the traveler is soon drawn back in and acclimated to the strange timelessness and company that is S. Thala. 

Written in a stark and cinematic narrative style, this sequel to Duras’s 1964 novelThe Ravishing of Lol Stein is a curious, yet haunting representation of the human memory: what we choose to recall, what we choose to forget, and how reliable we ultimately decide ourselves to be.

Praise

"A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of her powers.” —Edmund White

"Duras manages to combine the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives of confession and objectivity, of lyrical poetry and nouveau roman. The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader’s mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought." —New York Times

"Duras’s language and writing shine like crystals." —New Yorker