Duras gained literary fame with The Sea Wall, which, as noted, remains a traditional novel. Between this novel in 1950 and The Lover in 1984, she wrote at least twenty novels and numerous plays and film scenarios. During this time her own distinctive style evolved from a linear to a more psychological and circular pattern. Although the two books under consideration here relate the same events, they do so in very different ways. The critic Janice Morgan notes that, "In comparing L'Amant to Un Barrage, one discovers that this later book is, at once, more fragmented yet more thematically coherent than its fictional predecessor, more elusive, yet more complete . . . Both the fiction and the autobiography are based on a central conviction deeply held by the author, that language (the spoken) exists precisely to suggest, to evoke that which remains unspoken in life; that writing serves, therefore, primarily to...