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Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray: The Lover (Paperback, 1984, Pantheon)

The Lover (French: L'Amant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by …

I read this 30 years ago as a younger woman and as a coming of age story I saw in it a kind of terrible mirror. In the parlance of our times 'I felt seen'. This book is a vortex swirling around a single moment: a girl gets into a strangers car. Everything leading up to that moment and coming after circles it in the narrative, switching point of view from first to third and back. The subject is an object and back to a subject. Rereading this book I now see that it's a document of colonialism and patriarchy and the relationship between the two. A formative text for me, and a master work of autofiction.