Yann Andrea Steiner

“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—the force of a metaphysical contemplation of the paradoxes of the human heart.”—The New York Times Book Review (for The Lover)

Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance between two parallel loves; the love between Marguerite Duras and the young Yann Andréa, and a love witnessed (or imagined) through the narrator’s window—a seaside romance between a camp counselor and a camper. The summer of 1980 flows into 1944 in this enigmatic journey through history, creation, and raw emotion.

The daughter of French schoolteachers, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was born in Vietnam. At 17 she moved to France where she studied law and politics. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films, and short narratives, including her internationally best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work, The Lover (1984).

Story of love and solitude between a young man and a reminiscing writer. Duras' Death in Venice.

Publishers Weekly

In this lyrical memoir, French novelist Duras sketchily describes her affair with Yann Andrea Steiner, a man 30 years her junior, who helped her overcome alcoholism and depression. To further explore the bounds of unconventional or illicit love, Duras interweaves a semi-mythic tale about Johanna, an 18-year-old camp counselor who loves a six-year-old orphan named Samuel Steiner. Joanna tells Samuel that in 10 years they will reunite at midnight on a beach and make love. Samuel, we learn, is a Holocaust survivor who saw his sister murdered by a German soldier. There is yet another story-within-a-story: Johanna's fanciful allegory of cruelty and compassion involving a boy named David, a shark who wears a baseball cap and a weeping Fountain which dances a Guatemalan polka. The disparate parts of this mannered, self-indulgent exercise do not cohere into a whole. (Oct.)

The daughter of French schoolteachers, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was born in Vietnam. At age 17 she moved to France where she studied law and politics. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films, and short narratives, including her best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work, The Lover (1984). Mark Polizzotti has translated Jean Echenoz, Gustave Flaubert, André Breton, Christian Oster, among others. He has written a biography of Breton and is a senior editor at MFA Publications.