A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she, " a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try ... This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe, " and of its absence, "the malady of death. " "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning. " - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential. " - Translation Review.