Blue Eyes, Black Hair
1986 novel by Marguerite Duras
Blue Eyes, Black Hair (French: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs) is a 1986 novel by the French writer Marguerite Duras. It tells the story of a couple who meet by chance in a small vacation town. The man is homosexual and has recently fallen in love with a man with blue eyes and black hair. After meeting the woman at a cafe, he pays the woman to come to his room so that he can look at her, presumably in order to learn something about women or love.
Reception
Robert Steiner reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Times: "Blue Eyes, Black Hair is one of those minor erotic fictions that contemporary French literature celebrates. One finds it in Bataille, Blanchot and Robbe-Grillet—the familiar business of sex and death at a seascape, with parched characters whose sexual obsessions are poetry and whose longing becomes mordant philosophy[.]" Steiner continued: "The problem with this novel is that in its effort to evoke mystery, it is woefully precious and sentimental. The characters do not so much feel as wax poetic.
The public source identifies “Blue Eyes, Black Hair” as 1986 novel by Marguerite Duras. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blue, Eyes and Black.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3236201. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue Eyes, Black Hair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.