A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse explores the grammatical anatomy of the amorous mind. Borrowing from Nietzsche, Goethe, Freud, Stendhal, Sade and others, Barthes penetrates the heart and the head of the lover, studies the emotion behind the lover’s diction, his zeal and feverous intimacy. Barthes’ aphorismic poetry traverses the subtleties of experience that quivers inside the romantic agony of love. Beautiful as a Keatsian chord, painful as Beethoven’s delirious love and subtle as Chopin’s sadness, Barthes’ poetry of love, although sometimes painstakingly intense, slips into the spasm that trembles inside the heart of the mad lover and the pathos of desire. Barthes combines the sad reality of love, its psycholinguistic enigmas and the perpetual effort of the lover to bridge the incomprehensible gap in his love, to make the reader (if the reader has been a lover) relate, resurrect and revive the fatal identity of the lover that resides within him. Maybe you won’t shed your long lodged tears, but you surely will feel the dither in your eyes – the haunting reality of love, the rupture of desire and a hollow ghost wandering the broken lands of amorous drips. One read is not enough.

Do not approach this as a 'book' to be read. Approach it rather like it is a heap of diary entries ripped up and strewn on the floor... And try piecing for yourself a discourse from these fragments. It is the reader who has to make the effort to weigh the words and assign significance to any fragment, and like love itself, it is all heartbreakingly complex and simple at the same time. A true gem. If you find the many literary allusions (lots of Werther in there) daunting, just do not care. Just read it.

It's a remakable rendition of an ineffable voice that rests within. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the best works of Barthes. Enjoy reading :)

Conceptually book us very good

Best price. Brand new book. Good quality of paper.

Good book. Just wouldn't purchase anything from PBC Distributors. Had a terrible experience.

Unnecessary expensive.

Loving this book.

The definitive deconstruction of love. Every nuance of emotion, every detail of the painful process of falling in, being in, and letting go of love is covered. Beguiling in its simplicity this is a perfect way of dissecting every bewildering moment that being human means - after all, we have all fallen in love.

I bought this book as a gift very well received. It is unique. A brilliant French author!

Amazing, amazing book. It's dense, so it can take a while to push through, but it's such a beautiful book in its honesty and striking familiarity.

One of the most beautiful book ever written, you can read it as poetry, philosophy, consolation and so many other things...

A very heady and intense book. It overpowers you and wraps you within the needy and vicelike read of the narrator's psyche. If you have loved and lost, or are falling in love, it is bittersweet and heartrending, and at once soothes your pain and inflames it with fresh, emergent reminders of the incoherence of emotion. It is a very self-indulgent read - and not in a bad way. Something to read on your own, in private, and to take meaningful pauses at every other sentence or so to wonder about your own life and memories...