SOURCE: “Fiction,” in The Antioch Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 112-13.

In the following review, Otten deems The Lover a “parable of French colonialism.”

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984, The Lover was acclaimed as a major literary event and has been translated into all major world languages. Labeled nonfiction, the work repeats autobiographical material already present in The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique, 1950). The narrative presents the life of Saigon in the 1930s under the rule of French colonialism, where the life of the heroine parallels that of Duras, who was born there in 1914. Duras was brought up by her mother after her father's death, had two brothers, left Saigon in 1932, studied mathematics in Paris, and wanted to write. Yet the work cannot be classified as memoir because it is primarily fictional and a parable of French colonialism.

This love story, compared to the...