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. It 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. A slim memoir of a revitalizing love affair, overwhelmed by intellectual overkill. Ill, drinking too much, and unable to write, noted French author Duras was spending her time holed up in her apartment on the French coast until a chance correspondence with Yann Andrea Steiner, 36 years younger than herself, turned into a restorative affair when the young man visited her in the summer of 1980. Here- -recalling elliptically the details of their meetings, their living together, and their conversations, and creating a long fable that encompasses many of her favorite themes, including the Holocaust, the anarchy of passion, and the tragedies of childhood--Duras expresses gratitude for Steiner's restoring her health and her art, for being ``the voice of my life.'' The fable--which forms the major part of the text--was inspired by watching a group of children and their camp counselors on the beach, as well as by Steiner's inquiries about Theodora Kats, inspiration for a book that Duras had abandoned writing ``after thinking for years [that she] could write it.'' The mystery of Kats--a woman dressed all in white who was seen watching at a station as trains rolled by on their way to the concentration camps, and who may have been shot by the Germans or may have escaped to Switzerland--shadows Duras's fable. That fable itself concerns a six-year-old boy playing on the beach and in love with his counselor, who tells him stories of a mysterious fountain that must die. The fable is fraught with symbols, weighty messages, and an arch pretentiousness that ultimately renders it banal rather than significant. Thin, despite all the heavy stuffing. For die-hard Duras fans only. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.