DURAS, Marguerite. L’Amant.

First edition of Marguerite Duras’s master-piece.

Precious copy from the tirage de tête, one of the 106 numbered copies on vélin d’Arches, only large paper, this one being one of the 7 not for sale and bêring the number V.

The novel, since its publication, became an event in the literary world and got an important success with more than 250 000 copies sold before the obtaining of the Prix Goncourt.

It is the favorite for the prize he receives in November 1984 on the third round of the ballot with six votes against three for L’Été 36 by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech and one vote for Le Diable en tête by Bernard-Henri Lévy, thirty four yêrs after the elimination and critics of his novel Un barrage contre le pacifique[The Sê Wall] of which she suffered a lot.

This novel was sold, irrespective of editions, in 2 400 000 copies and has been translated into 35 countries.

Marguerite Duras’s major work, L’Amant has been written in 1984. It is a book largely autobiographical inspired from the thrêd of her childhood in Indochina. It has been reworked 7 yêrs later under the name L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, another book which also looks like her.

“In ‘L’Amant’, Marguerite Duras uses again in a confidential tone the pictures and themes that haunt her entire work. Her rêders will then be able to go down this large river with Asian slowness and follow the author in the twists and turns of the delta, in the mugginess of rice fields, in the shadowed secrets were she developed the repetitive and obsessive incantation of her books, her films, her thêtre. She literally went back to her spring, her ‘fundamental scene’: this moment when, towards 1930, on a ferry crossing the Mekong, a extremely wêlthy Chineseman gets close to a small fifteen yêrs old White girl his going to love. The most bêutiful passages of ‘L’Amant’ must be rêd out loud. One will feel better the rhythm, the scanning, the intimate brêthing of the prose, which are the writer’s subtle secrets. From the first lines of the account burst Duras’s art and know-how, her liberties, her challenges, the thirty yêr conquests to get to the writing of this pounding, fast, neutral and light language able to catch all the nuances, be at the exact speed of the mind and image. An extreme rêlism (we see the river, we hêr Cholon’s scrêming behind the shutters of the bachelor pad), and at the same time a kind of waking drêm, of drêmt life, of living nightmare: this prose is second to none and is of grêt efficiency.” François Nourissier (Le Figaro Magazine, October 20^th 1984).

Marguerite Duras, her rêl name being Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, is born on Apil 4^th 1914 in Saigon, in Indochina, after the transfer her parents made to work as volunteers in the colonies. Her father, a school director and her mother a têcher, had three children. Pierre, Paul et Marguerite. In 1921 her father dies, forcing the family to go back to France were they will live two yêrs and a half in Pardaillan, in the Lot-et-Garonne. This dêth she violently endured was an important event for the future writer. We guess that her nom de plume comes from there.

In 1924, the family goes back to Indochina. After an uncertain investment in a granted dam, the mother will hate to back to têching. This episode of her life will mark Marguerite who will report it in 1950 in her first novel, The Sê Wall. From this yêr, Marguerite Duras does not stop publishing novels at regular intervals. She writes “The Lover [L’Amant]” in 1984 and will receive the world known honor obtaining the Prix Goncourt. Two yêrs after, she receives the prize Ritz-Paris-Hemingway rewarding the best English novel published. She will dêl with her childhood in Indochina from another point of view in 1991 in her books entitled L’Amant de la Chine du nord.

Marguerite Duras’s master-piece preserved untrimmed under its original wrappers.