The Orphans of Love

The psychological tension between intimacy and distance, self-revelation, and estrangement accounts for much of the fascination and allure Marguerite DurasDuras’ The Lover and Isabel Allende’sAllende The Japanese Lover exert upon their readers. While both texts concern a knotty tangle of characters searching for love in the wreckage of the 20th Century, central to the narrative is the enigma of the absence. Love is a muted passion, a dialectical interplay between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, the “how much” the author reveals or conceals has to do with how much love can endure.