Yann Andrea Steiner - Tapa blanda

Once again Mark Polizzotti has produced a masterly rendering of a modern French classic. --Harry Mathews

Marguerite Duras's voice, whenever we hear it, always goes straight for our hearts. --Le Monde Diplomatique

This Duras is deeply Duras. Her sentences grow alarmed if they grow longer than a line, yet there seems nothing to be alarmed about since they are apparently as empty as a road at sunrise. Then suddenly you arrive at your destination: a forest of feeling. You think, I have been here before, yet I recognize nothing. Whose trees are these? That is because only Duras' entire oeuvre could have composed this text. The translation is lovely. --William H. Gass

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... --New York Times Book Review, on The Lover

Marguerite Duras conjures images, memories, and sensations out of the air and into a series of freely associated essays. One can sense the pleasure this 20th-century literary giant felt in setting off onto this ethereal odyssey...Mark Polizzotti's translation is a joy in itself. --Boston Magazine, on Writing

Dedicated to Duras’ companion with whom she spent her last decade of life, Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andréa and a seaside romance observed – or imagined – by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister’s murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion.