Yann Andrea Steiner

A memoir by the author of The Lover and Summer Rain describes her relationship with a man thirty years her junior who has helped her overcome, despair, illness, and alcoholism.From Publishers WeeklyIn 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. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalIt is the summer of 1980, the summer that brought solidarity to Gdansk, Poland. A young man fleeing his own demons arrives at a Normandy seaside resort to meet "a woman old already and crazy with writing." She is famous and alone; he is a knowing child. Their love story forms the core of this mesmerizing narrative in which the injustice of world events sinks into a larger pool of evil that haunts both him and her: the Nazis' murder of Jews in World World II. Duras's tribute to the young lover, Steiner, glides seamlessly (translated by the intrepid Bray) into an all-embracing Durasian allegory of desire and the sea. The writer has daily observed a child camper and his teenaged counselor on the beach; as the writer and her lover grow closer, they are transformed in the narrative into this young couple knocking against the mysteries that engulf them. Duras remains perplexing, frank, and marvelous; this work will speak to avid readers of her work.- Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.