Marguerite Duras called The Lover 'a load of shit', but her novel about her affair as a 15-year-old stuns with its emotional force

Tony Ka Fai Leung and Jane March in the 1992 film of The Lover IMDB

This is part of an occasional series, making the case for or against controversial books.

Marguerite Duras, one of the most iconic French writers of the 20th century, didn’t think much of her most commercially successful novel The Lover (1984), a fictionalised account of an affair she had as a 15-year-old with a Chinese man nearly twice her age.