Book Reveiw : The Lover - Marguerite Dumas** I have read only a handful of novels translated from French, and with the exception of Jules Verne's Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, I havn't really enjoyed any of them. This is no exception, I didn't enjoy the terse, taught dialogue free literary style at all, and wed to a story that wasn't wildly exciting or particularly well told it made for a damp squib of a book. The back page blurbs are hugely enthusiastic, 'a perfect tour de force' - New York Times Book Review, 'Rarely have I read a novel so flawlessly written' - Spectator, and so on. The plot, young daughter of French family on the down in the last days of France's imperial reach into the far East meets rich young son of wealthy Chinese family, has a lot of odd sex, sort of falls in love, family are withdrawn, uncommunicative and emotionally stunted. French authors (admittedly, in my limited experience of them) seem to love wallowing in some form of existential emotional angst, or just general weirdness. The last three French novels I have read (Atomised, School's Out and The Lover) all seem to edge around a similar theme of unrequited love, no, not unrequited, uncommited would be a better word. The French appear unable in these novels to commit to love, to lose themselves in it, to give themselves over to another person wholeheartedly, and thus they hover on the sidelines of love and passion, forever wondering and agonising over whether they should be experiencing something better but failing to see that this, the here and now, the present is actually what they are looking for.