Minimalism is, for the practitioner, one of the more seductive literary modes. Like abstract painting, it looks easy, and as most of the action takes place in the realm of the unstated, the writer need not be bothered with the messy mechanics of plot or character development. Hemingway bewitched several generations of prose stylists with his primer-simple narratives and his aesthetic of exclusion: the unstated emotion, he maintained, can pack as much of a wallop as the stated one. In his hands the technique often worked—the early stories and novels, especially, quiver with repressed materials; but his legion of imitators the world over have given understatement a bad name. Few of them have bothered to learn the all-important corollary to that aesthetic—that the emotion, though not declared, must nevertheless exist. Most of us, I suspect, now balk when confronted with a page of fashionably lean prose. Dress it up how you will, I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it.

Rules make life ordinary, but exceptions make it bearable. A handful of unexpected masterpieces in the last few decades—Max Frisch's Montauk, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, and Lars Gustafsson's The Death of a Beekeeper come to mind—have shown that literary minimalism is still a viable enterprise. To this short list I would add Marguerite Duras's Goncourt Prize-winning novella, The Lover.

Duras's book presents, in flashback, the story of an adolescent French girl's coming of age—mostly in terms of her sexual involvement with an older Chinese man—in colonial Saigon in the 1930's. It is not, as some reviewers have suggested, a straight-faced remake of Lolita. The bond between these lovers is more existential than erotic. Indeed, the obsessive intensity of their coupling hints, according to minimalist precepts of exclusion, at the pervasiveness of the despair they hope to extinguish. Readers might find themselves blinking away images from Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour, for which Duras wrote the script.

The narrator—I will not make so bold as to call her Duras, though the biographical particulars seems to match up—begins her telling with an encounter from the present. An old acquaintance approaches her on the street and delivers the following compliment: “Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” The word echoes like a pistol shot in an empty street. We know we are in for anything but a lighthearted romp through the past.

The first third of the book hovers around a single image, a memory from the narrator's youth that is as composed and static as a photograph. “It might have existed,” she writes, “a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. But it wasn't. The subject was too slight.” A girl, age fifteen and a half (the specificity tells us at once of the struggle between girlishness and precocity), stands by herself at the rail of a ferry crossing the Mekong River. She is on her way to her boarding school in Saigon; she's dressed in a hand-me-down silk dress, an exotic pair of gold lamé high heels, and a flat-brimmed pink hat with a broad black ribbon. Duras devotes several pages to her apparel, describing the acquisition of each item. But what we are really getting is a series of glimpses into a melancholy, fatherless childhood. An observation like the following tells us more about the family situation than pages of patient characterization:

When my mother emerges, comes out of her despair, she sees the man's hat and the gold lamé shoes. She asks what it's all about. I say nothing. She looks at me, is pleased, smiles. Not bad, she says, they quite suit you, make a change. She doesn't ask if it's she who bought them, she knows she did.

There is, of course, another reason why the image is so painstakingly examined. The girl at the rail is just moments away from her fateful encounter. She has already taken note of the long black limousine and the gentleman watching her through the window; the promise of his otherness has already begun to penetrate her self-absorption.

A solitary, beguiling girl at a turning point in her life, inhaling the last air of innocence … The fantasy is an easy one to fall in with. But, as the puzzle books put it, something is wrong with this picture. And the more Duras keeps returning to it, the more we sense that. Carefully inserted vignettes and background details gradually force us to abandon the Pollyanna drift of our reverie. The girl on the barge is inwardly cauterized. Living in gloomy tropical houses with a half-mad mother and two tormented brothers has long since destroyed any joyous freshness in her. She is going through the paces of late adolescence with a cool detachment. Not lust, but a need even deeper—a need to be touched, to be certified as existing—makes her respond to the man's overtures.

Readers lured on by the promise of titillation will be disappointed. They will find no elaborate seduction scene, no fetishism (the gold lamé heels are a bit of naturalism, not a come-on), no variations on the themes of master/slave or colonialism-in-the-boudoir. These are just two strangers, adrift, frightened, and almost entirely opaque to themselves. He—no name is given—is a rich man's son, uncentered by wealth and idleness; he trembles when he offers her a cigarette and later can scarcely bring himself to touch her. She, in turn, tells him: “I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you usually do with women.” Their interchanges go largely unreported. But Duras does not need conversation to bring across the shuddering immediacy of the first bodily encounter or the emergent contours of their relationship:

The skin is sumptuously soft. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he's weak, probably a prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn't look him in the face. Doesn't look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.

We wonder, momentarily, about that “dreadful love” but dismiss it as a young girl's ignorant perception. Neither do we find, as months pass, that anything resembling love develops between them. They have their ritual. He picks her up at school in his limousine, they go to his room in the city's Chinese quarter, he drives her back. We almost never hear them exchange words; their lovemaking is fierce, but in Duras's telling affectless: there is no apparent progress in their affections. When, from time to time, he takes the girl's mother and brothers out to dinner, no one talks. She explains to him that they are like that with everyone. The dominant impression is of claustrophobic unreality, as if this man and girl had been excerpted from the space-time continuum.

The affair continues for a year and a half. Then, one day, the girl is told that the family is returning to France, that passage has been booked. There is no shock or panic; any tremors they might feel travel inward. We get this flat report: “Once the date of my departure was fixed, distant though it still was, he could do nothing with my body any more.”

The parting is simple, cinematic. The girl sees the black limousine on the pier as her boat pulls away. They will never see each other again. Years later she will learn that he has married a girl chosen for him by his parents. The unhappy business is consigned to memory, becomes a painful episode in what the French fondly call l'éducation sentimentale. Until, suddenly, in a time near the present (“years after the war, after marriage, children, divorces, books …”), he calls her. He is in Paris, traveling with his wife. He has followed her career, her literary successes. They converse nervously. “They didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.” With these words the book ends.

A sketchy chronicle like this cannot account for the power of The Lover, which derives as much from its silences as from its narrative. Duras's decision to present the story as a memory, to let a half century of vanished time function as a sounding chamber, is a brilliant one. Had the story been told in the present, the reticence, the terse notations, would have seemed mannered. This way, though, the spareness reveals as nothing else can the harsh abrasions of time. The woman with the ravaged face has given us a disturbing picture of the workings of destiny.

The Lover is saturated with a peculiarly Gallic ennui. As a result, the final lines break in on the gloom swiftly and unexpectedly. The telephone conversation transfigures everything. Both man and affair take on a retroactive profundity, invalidating our dismissal. This, in turn, makes the image of the limousine on the pier the very emblem of ill-starred love. The tale is rewritten in the space of a breath; its density, depth, and hopelessness become even more pervasive. Now, however, his love—its mysterious persistence—flings a beam of light into the darkness. And we can't help but steer our way toward it.

The Lover was published here in 1985 to considerable acclaim, garnering for Duras the wider recognition that had eluded her before through a long career as a novelist and script writer. Readers were as much taken with the trembling staccato of her narrative style as they were with the narrative itself. That eerie and lacerating work will doubtless be invoked in most assessments of The War: A Memoir (1986). For this prose, too, is voiced through a numbed, life-scarred “I,” and concerns itself, at least in part, with the ambiguities of love and the immense difficulty of bridging the space that exists between even the most kindred of souls.

Similarities do abound, but it is the primary difference that is most instructive. The Lover was written in the near present, after the passing of decades had stripped off emotional clutter and had left only the bleached residues of event. The War, on the other hand, comprises a diary and several memoirs and stories written by Duras in the 1940's; the main sections, she claims in a short preface, were put down in exercise books and forgotten. The first of these, “The War,” is still mysterious to the author: “I recognize my handwriting and the details of the story. … But I can't see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?” The congruity between works—the one remembered, the other forgotten—almost suggests that there is a deeper “writing self” that stands apart from the movements of time and circumstance.

The War has five sections. The longest of these, “The War” and “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier,” are directly autobiographical, and form, along with the thinly disguised (Duras admits it) story “Albert of the Capital/Ter of the Militia,” the compelling core of the book. The two slight tales grafted to the end, “The Crushed Nettle” and “Aurelia Paris,” lack the peculiar quiver that Duras's manipulation of her own persona invariably provides.

“The War” is, quite simply, a diary that was begun by the author when she heard that the German camps were being liberated. Her husband, identified only as Robert L., had been shipped to Belsen during the occupation for his resistance activities. Duras would not find out for a month if he was among the survivors or not. The entries—sometimes several for a single day—forge a nearly unendurable chronicle of fear and morbid fantasy. Time is registered not on the clock but in the nerve endings:

You don't exist anymore in comparison with this waiting. More images pass through your head than there are on all the roads in Germany. Bursts of machine gun fire every minute inside your head. And yet you're still there, the bullets aren't fatal. Shot in transit. Dead with an empty stomach. His hunger wheels around in your head like a vulture.

Duras tries to quell her agony by giving up hope. But, alas, one cannot control the mechanism with a resolve. She can only endure her dread. She works, spends long days in transit centers, helping others. Still, she cannot stop herself from prowling among the endless lines of returnees, scanning faces. The horror of it all nearly finishes her off. Then the call comes: Robert L. is alive.

Duras's pain does not end with Robert L.'s return—it just becomes more specific. For now the worst imaginings have been replaced by a reality that almost defies language. Every resource, we sense, is mustered to get the words to the page. No other choice is allowed. Only through the most precise accounting will history be served. Man must be able to look at what Man has done:

The head was connected to the body by the neck, as heads usually are, but the neck was so withered and shrunken—you could circle it with one hand—that you wondered how life could pass through it; a spoonful of gruel almost blocked it. … You could see the vertebrae through it, the carotid arteries, the nerves, the pharynx, and the blood passing through: the skin had become like cigarette paper.

This, I may add, is the mildest of her reports.

The love we find here is not romantic, but biological. We feel Duras's struggle to reverse, through the most patient ministrations, the destruction wrought by an enemy that despised the human miracle. Astonishingly enough, the body is revealed to be the vessel for an entity more precious still: “… it was then, by his deathbed, that I knew him, Robert L., best, that I understood forever what made him himself, himself alone and nothing and no one else in the world. …” The diary breaks off with Robert L.'s recovery.

The other autobiographical sections are not nearly as harrowing. Both, however, give us sustained insight into the hectic and treacherous life in resistance cadres. In “Monsieur X,” the more complex of the pieces, Duras depicts her desperate cat-and-mouse involvement with a young Gestapo officer (he claims to know the whereabouts of Robert L.). Fear, anxiety, and—yes—fascination are plaited with a slender filament of pity. Her devotion to justice—she finally denounces the man to her comrades—does not blind her to the uncertainty they share. Indeed, this is the quality that distinguishes Duras as a writer. On every page we hear a woman who is unable to hide from the truth, whose strength must take root in the hardest place—the far side of vulnerability.