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The Lover #1
袥褞斜芯胁薪懈泻褗褌
袦邪褉谐褜芯褉懈褌 袛褞褉邪褋 锌褍斜谢懈泻褍胁邪 褌邪蟹懈 泻薪懈谐邪 胁 泻褗褋薪懈褌械 褋懈 谐芯写懈薪懈 懈 褍写懈胁谢褟胁邪 谢懈褌械褉邪褌褍褉薪懈褟 褋胁褟褌: 胁褗锌褉械泻懈 褔械 褌芯谐邪胁邪 械 胁械褔械 褋褌邪褉懈褑邪, 邪胁褌芯褉泻邪褌邪 薪邪 屑薪芯谐芯斜褉芯泄薪懈 褏懈褌芯胁械 芯褌 锌械褌写械褋械褌褌械 懈 褕械褋褌写械褋褌褌械 谐芯写懈薪懈 写芯泻邪蟹胁邪, 褔械 胁褋械 锌邪泻 谢褞斜芯胁褌邪 懈 械褉芯褋褗褌 褋邪 薪械懈蟹褔械褉锌邪械屑懈 褌械屑懈. 袣邪泻褌芯 芯褌斜械谢褟蟹胁邪 械写懈薪 泻褉懈褌懈泻, 褋褌褉邪薪懈褑懈褌械 薪邪 褌邪蟹懈 褌胁芯褉斜邪 锌褉械写褋褌邪胁谢褟胁邪褌 屑邪谢泻懈 锌芯械屑懈 胁 锌褉芯蟹邪, 褉邪蟹斜懈褉邪械屑懈 懈 斜谢懈蟹泻懈 蟹邪 胁褋懈褔泻懈, 懈 薪械锌芯胁褌芯褉懈屑懈 胁 褋胁芯褟褌邪 泻褉邪褋芯褌邪. 袩褉械蟹 锌褗褉胁懈褌械 写胁械 谐芯写懈薪懈 褋谢械写 懈蟹谢懈蟹邪薪械褌芯 屑褍 胁褗胁 肖褉邪薪褑懈褟, 褉芯屑邪薪褗褌 "袥褞斜芯胁薪懈泻褗褌" 械 锌褉芯写邪写械薪 胁 褔械褌胁褗褉褌 屑懈谢懈芯薪 械泻蟹械屑锌谢褟褉邪. 袩懈褋邪褌械谢褟褌 泻褉懈褌懈泻 肖褉邪薪褋芯邪 袧褍褉懈褋懈械 锌懈褕械: "袧邪泄-褏褍斜邪胁懈褌械 褔邪褋褌懈 薪邪 "袥褞斜芯胁薪懈泻褗褌" 褌褉褟斜胁邪 写邪 斜褗写邪褌 褔械褌械薪懈 薪邪 谐谢邪褋. 孝邪泻邪 锌芯-写芯斜褉械 褋械 锌芯褔褍胁褋褌胁邪褌 褉懈褌褗屑褗褌, 褋泻邪薪写懈褉邪薪械褌芯 懈 懈蟹褌褗薪褔械薪芯褌芯 锌褍谢褋懈褉邪薪械 薪邪 锌褉芯蟹邪褌邪, 蟹邪褖芯褌芯 胁褋懈褔泻芯 褌芯胁邪 褋邪 褋褗泻褉芯胁械薪懈褌械 褌邪泄薪懈 薪邪 褌胁芯褉械褑邪".
94 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
2565 people are currently reading
76770 people want to read
About the author
Marguerite Duras
396听books3,076听followersMarguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 6,503 reviews
May 27, 2025
I realized while I was ranting trying to convince a friend why this book is a must-read earlier today that I sounded like the Stefon character from SNL. I mean, this book has everything that I love, the vibes are immaculate. It鈥檚 like
This book has EVERYTHING: bleakness, desire, shame, novella length, devastating self-reflections, perfect prose, class commentary, power dynamics, depressing family dynamics, queer desire, smadding鈥攜ou know that thing where the book is so sad it makes you smile because depraved and depressing novels are very much your jam, you freaky little book nerd, you鈥攔egret, French people, critiques of masculinity, critiques of colonialism, metafiction, unhinged decision making, this is a festival of fucked and feverish feelings in 120pgs and a pleasure unto death.
I read this in a single sitting and I鈥檓 sitting here hours later still emotionally shaken. This is very much my sort of thing. Oh wait, I鈥檓 getting ahead of myself, we should do a Review right? Stefon, this is a GOODREADS. Okay, okay, you鈥檙e right, here goes:
Memory is a butterfly flitting by in flashes and if we try to pin it down, to put our finger on the fluttering of the past, it often turns to powder upon our fingers. Memory fades or is altered by our act of trying to capture it, yet memory also has the ability to seemingly fold time. 鈥�Very early in my life, it was too late,鈥� French author Marguerite Duras writes in The Lover, a statement that directly addresses the method for which past and present become intertwined and timeless in her recollections much the way this novelistic memoir blends biography and fiction. The result is pure literary bliss. Winner of the 1984 and presented here in beautiful translation by (for which she was awarded the in 1986) that captures the endlessly poetic potency of Duras鈥� prose, The Lover is a novel of memory, but it is also an examination of desire and navigating the self amidst family, death, social class and social taboos. This is also a novel of crossings such as the girl鈥檚 crossing of the Mekong river that often feels like the center of gravity to the narrative, the crossing of culture and age between the girl and the older Chinese man who becomes her lover, and even a crisscrossing of the timeline found in the fragmentary narrative style. A whirlwind of reflections and the ravages of desire, The Lover is as crisp as it is confident and completely shook up my heart.
From the 1992 film adaptation by
Duras constructs a portrait of a woman across her many ages, all spiraling into one, and opens on a pitch perfect look at the course of a life all within one face:
This was a book that completely ravaged me as well. With Duras鈥� exquisite prose punctuated by bold assertions and harsh assessments, with the exhaustion of fragile love at the mercy to society yet burning with unquenchable passion, with the haunting looks at family and identity in the clutches of social order and colonialism, and with the rapid fire of memories that are practically flung into your face. The story is told in brief vignettes that ignore any linearity. The reflections come almost at random and almost all at once, as if Duras has dropped and shattered a jar of memories and is frantically gathering them up as they attempt to roll away underfoot. These memories are based in biography (though no previous knowledge of Duras is necessary) but take wings of fiction, almost as if to impress the theme that to touch memory or to try and understand or shape it is to rewrite it and overlay the elusive past. It鈥檚 as she writes herself:
You can feel this strong lifeforce in every sentence and word as Duras transforms herself into art upon the page. The story bears many similarities to the film , for which Duras鈥� wrote the screenplay, and plays with Duras鈥� own experience in Vietnam when it was still called French Indochina. It was her most popular novel, published when Duras was 70, though while working on the 1992 film adaptation she would lament over the popularity of the book. In her biography by , Duras is quoted as telling director Jean-Jacques Annaud 鈥�the Lover is a load of shit鈥t鈥檚 an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.鈥� Personally I found it delightful but I do enjoy the admission of intoxication during the writing process as the cavalcade of observations strung across tenuous connections does indeed feel like the confident logic of a brilliant mind greased up and ready to rant after a few drinks.
鈥�She wasn鈥檛 sure that she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
The novel is best remembered for the relationship between the teenage girl and the older, wealthy Chinese man she meets after crossing the Mekong River. Crossings are a large theme of the novel, and while the girl only crosses the river twice, the second time to leave the man behind and return to France, the narrator is now crossing for a third time鈥攎etaphorically鈥攖o reinvestigate the site of her memories. It is a taboo relationship, though the focus is less on the torrid love affair and more on the curious power dynamics between them. He is wealthy, experienced and much older (it is mentioned he would be arrested due to her being so young), yet, socially, she holds all the power. She is French and white and he is Chinese. She is the colonizer and he is the colonized. Even her poverty seems to not matter and she admits he is only able to obtain her because of his access to wealth.
A lot of this book takes a swift swipe at the house of cards that is patriarchy and masculinity. The girl (the unnamed characters make them fairly symbolic as a larger social critique, perchance?) has no masculine figure in her life (her father has been in the ground a minute) and often adopts elements of gender-role-reversal. It is in order to obtain a way away from this life as she understand that the goal in life is 鈥�not that you have to achieve anything, it鈥檚 that you have to get away from where you are.鈥� Her most distinguishing visual element frequently referenced in the text is a large, flat-brimmed hat usually worn by men. While being noted as a discounted hat to nudge the aspect of her poverty and resourcefulness, it also shows her taking on a masculine role almost as a costume and a symbol of her desire for independence. It works, as it does attract her lover and gives her access to his money, and we see how she frequently describes him in terms of weakness and subservience to her. Even his sense of dominance as sexually experienced is described in terms as a response to fear:
This stems from another element of the strange power dynamic too. Even despite the inappropriateness , legally and socially, of him sleeping with a minor she is still in a position of dominance due to her status as a white, French family. There is a startling moment where he is trying to impress her family, showing them the sights and cuisine and they refuse to even acknowledge he exists. The man is in tears asking why they abuse him so as they ignore him, gorging themselves on food and insulting the city. It is a powerful moment that shows the rampant racism embedded in obdurate social hierarchies where even this millionaire is less than human to the poor, white family.
鈥�I am worn out with desire.鈥�
More on the family in a moment but I can鈥檛 move away from the erotic aspects of the novel and the discussions on sex and the body as a sort of metaphor for land being colonized without also bringing up the queer desires in the novel. The narrator reflects on H茅l猫ne Lagonelle and her nude body, bold and unashamed as if oblivious to the desire and power her naked figure represents. It is through her that the narrator wishes to pass her sexual appetites for the man into her, almost as if conquering H茅l猫ne鈥檚 body by having his be the one to take it as he does her own. 鈥�I鈥檇 like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers,鈥� she thinks, 鈥�I am worn out with desire for H茅l猫ne Lagonelle.鈥�
鈥�We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.鈥�
Her family is another major theme of the novel, such as her disdain for her older brother, her passion and awareness of mortality found in her younger brother and most notable, the struggles to keep a family and her own mental state together found in the mother. The Lover is as much a portrait of the mother as it is the daughter. It is a family held together by shame, disgraced by their fall from financial security yet still higher on the social hierarchy in French Indochina. But also this passage completely slayed me:
While society is constantly seen as the oppressor鈥攎ore so for the lover, who is even threatened to be cut off from his family fortune if he continues with the girl鈥攖hey also, shamefully, cling to society in the ways it gives them a leg up. It becomes rather self-effacing. Though the brother, who is a real shithead, also further represents colonialism, refusing to find work and spending his days engaged in theft and perversion to uphold himself. The younger brother, however, becomes the doorway through which the narrator learns 鈥�immortality is mortal.鈥� His death shakes her and makes her realize life is fleeting and death is inevitable.
All this culminates into her turning both inward and backward on her life in reflection. It is notable that her reflections tend to focus on photographs and images of herself, as a primary theme of the novel is the idea that the self shown to the world, ones image, is what society values. There is a strong juxtaposition of interior self versus exterior self, and her reflections attempt to bridge the gaps.
鈥�It's as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that.鈥�
In her novel Shame, French Nobel Prize winner contrasts her ideas of memory with that of , for whom memory is exterior to the self. She explains his perspective of memory found in 鈥�things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind.鈥� For Ernaux, however, she finds 鈥� the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.鈥� Duras鈥� The Lover seems to align more with Ernaux, particularly in the fragmented nature of the self as reflected by the narrative style, but also that the external self is a false self that does not serve as a reliable compass towards identity. It is more fit for social hierarchy and posturing, though she also finds this serves a purpose that the interior self cannot achieve. It is only late in life with a 鈥�ravaged face鈥� that she feels her external and internal self align more authentically. A moving and often devastating read, The Lover contains multitudes in its succinct space. It is no wonder this has become a classic work and Duras certainly demonstrates her exemplary prowess of prose and thought.
4.5/5
鈥�And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.鈥�
This book has EVERYTHING: bleakness, desire, shame, novella length, devastating self-reflections, perfect prose, class commentary, power dynamics, depressing family dynamics, queer desire, smadding鈥攜ou know that thing where the book is so sad it makes you smile because depraved and depressing novels are very much your jam, you freaky little book nerd, you鈥攔egret, French people, critiques of masculinity, critiques of colonialism, metafiction, unhinged decision making, this is a festival of fucked and feverish feelings in 120pgs and a pleasure unto death.
I read this in a single sitting and I鈥檓 sitting here hours later still emotionally shaken. This is very much my sort of thing. Oh wait, I鈥檓 getting ahead of myself, we should do a Review right? Stefon, this is a GOODREADS. Okay, okay, you鈥檙e right, here goes:
Memory is a butterfly flitting by in flashes and if we try to pin it down, to put our finger on the fluttering of the past, it often turns to powder upon our fingers. Memory fades or is altered by our act of trying to capture it, yet memory also has the ability to seemingly fold time. 鈥�Very early in my life, it was too late,鈥� French author Marguerite Duras writes in The Lover, a statement that directly addresses the method for which past and present become intertwined and timeless in her recollections much the way this novelistic memoir blends biography and fiction. The result is pure literary bliss. Winner of the 1984 and presented here in beautiful translation by (for which she was awarded the in 1986) that captures the endlessly poetic potency of Duras鈥� prose, The Lover is a novel of memory, but it is also an examination of desire and navigating the self amidst family, death, social class and social taboos. This is also a novel of crossings such as the girl鈥檚 crossing of the Mekong river that often feels like the center of gravity to the narrative, the crossing of culture and age between the girl and the older Chinese man who becomes her lover, and even a crisscrossing of the timeline found in the fragmentary narrative style. A whirlwind of reflections and the ravages of desire, The Lover is as crisp as it is confident and completely shook up my heart.
From the 1992 film adaptation by
Duras constructs a portrait of a woman across her many ages, all spiraling into one, and opens on a pitch perfect look at the course of a life all within one face:
鈥�One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, 鈥淚鈥檝e known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you鈥檙e more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.鈥�
This was a book that completely ravaged me as well. With Duras鈥� exquisite prose punctuated by bold assertions and harsh assessments, with the exhaustion of fragile love at the mercy to society yet burning with unquenchable passion, with the haunting looks at family and identity in the clutches of social order and colonialism, and with the rapid fire of memories that are practically flung into your face. The story is told in brief vignettes that ignore any linearity. The reflections come almost at random and almost all at once, as if Duras has dropped and shattered a jar of memories and is frantically gathering them up as they attempt to roll away underfoot. These memories are based in biography (though no previous knowledge of Duras is necessary) but take wings of fiction, almost as if to impress the theme that to touch memory or to try and understand or shape it is to rewrite it and overlay the elusive past. It鈥檚 as she writes herself:
鈥�The story of my life doesn鈥檛 exist. Does not exist. There鈥檚 never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it鈥檚 not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I鈥檝e already written, more or less 鈥� I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I鈥檓 doing now is both different and the same.鈥�
You can feel this strong lifeforce in every sentence and word as Duras transforms herself into art upon the page. The story bears many similarities to the film , for which Duras鈥� wrote the screenplay, and plays with Duras鈥� own experience in Vietnam when it was still called French Indochina. It was her most popular novel, published when Duras was 70, though while working on the 1992 film adaptation she would lament over the popularity of the book. In her biography by , Duras is quoted as telling director Jean-Jacques Annaud 鈥�the Lover is a load of shit鈥t鈥檚 an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.鈥� Personally I found it delightful but I do enjoy the admission of intoxication during the writing process as the cavalcade of observations strung across tenuous connections does indeed feel like the confident logic of a brilliant mind greased up and ready to rant after a few drinks.
鈥�She wasn鈥檛 sure that she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
The novel is best remembered for the relationship between the teenage girl and the older, wealthy Chinese man she meets after crossing the Mekong River. Crossings are a large theme of the novel, and while the girl only crosses the river twice, the second time to leave the man behind and return to France, the narrator is now crossing for a third time鈥攎etaphorically鈥攖o reinvestigate the site of her memories. It is a taboo relationship, though the focus is less on the torrid love affair and more on the curious power dynamics between them. He is wealthy, experienced and much older (it is mentioned he would be arrested due to her being so young), yet, socially, she holds all the power. She is French and white and he is Chinese. She is the colonizer and he is the colonized. Even her poverty seems to not matter and she admits he is only able to obtain her because of his access to wealth.
鈥�poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that鈥檚 what we were. That鈥檚 how I came to be here with you.鈥�
A lot of this book takes a swift swipe at the house of cards that is patriarchy and masculinity. The girl (the unnamed characters make them fairly symbolic as a larger social critique, perchance?) has no masculine figure in her life (her father has been in the ground a minute) and often adopts elements of gender-role-reversal. It is in order to obtain a way away from this life as she understand that the goal in life is 鈥�not that you have to achieve anything, it鈥檚 that you have to get away from where you are.鈥� Her most distinguishing visual element frequently referenced in the text is a large, flat-brimmed hat usually worn by men. While being noted as a discounted hat to nudge the aspect of her poverty and resourcefulness, it also shows her taking on a masculine role almost as a costume and a symbol of her desire for independence. It works, as it does attract her lover and gives her access to his money, and we see how she frequently describes him in terms of weakness and subservience to her. Even his sense of dominance as sexually experienced is described in terms as a response to fear:
鈥�he鈥檚 a man who must make love a lot, a man who鈥檚 afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear.鈥�
This stems from another element of the strange power dynamic too. Even despite the inappropriateness , legally and socially, of him sleeping with a minor she is still in a position of dominance due to her status as a white, French family. There is a startling moment where he is trying to impress her family, showing them the sights and cuisine and they refuse to even acknowledge he exists. The man is in tears asking why they abuse him so as they ignore him, gorging themselves on food and insulting the city. It is a powerful moment that shows the rampant racism embedded in obdurate social hierarchies where even this millionaire is less than human to the poor, white family.
鈥�I am worn out with desire.鈥�
More on the family in a moment but I can鈥檛 move away from the erotic aspects of the novel and the discussions on sex and the body as a sort of metaphor for land being colonized without also bringing up the queer desires in the novel. The narrator reflects on H茅l猫ne Lagonelle and her nude body, bold and unashamed as if oblivious to the desire and power her naked figure represents. It is through her that the narrator wishes to pass her sexual appetites for the man into her, almost as if conquering H茅l猫ne鈥檚 body by having his be the one to take it as he does her own. 鈥�I鈥檇 like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers,鈥� she thinks, 鈥�I am worn out with desire for H茅l猫ne Lagonelle.鈥�
鈥�We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.鈥�
Her family is another major theme of the novel, such as her disdain for her older brother, her passion and awareness of mortality found in her younger brother and most notable, the struggles to keep a family and her own mental state together found in the mother. The Lover is as much a portrait of the mother as it is the daughter. It is a family held together by shame, disgraced by their fall from financial security yet still higher on the social hierarchy in French Indochina. But also this passage completely slayed me:
鈥�We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves.鈥�
While society is constantly seen as the oppressor鈥攎ore so for the lover, who is even threatened to be cut off from his family fortune if he continues with the girl鈥攖hey also, shamefully, cling to society in the ways it gives them a leg up. It becomes rather self-effacing. Though the brother, who is a real shithead, also further represents colonialism, refusing to find work and spending his days engaged in theft and perversion to uphold himself. The younger brother, however, becomes the doorway through which the narrator learns 鈥�immortality is mortal.鈥� His death shakes her and makes her realize life is fleeting and death is inevitable.
鈥�its while its being lived that life is immortal, while its still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown鈥�
All this culminates into her turning both inward and backward on her life in reflection. It is notable that her reflections tend to focus on photographs and images of herself, as a primary theme of the novel is the idea that the self shown to the world, ones image, is what society values. There is a strong juxtaposition of interior self versus exterior self, and her reflections attempt to bridge the gaps.
鈥�It's as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that.鈥�
In her novel Shame, French Nobel Prize winner contrasts her ideas of memory with that of , for whom memory is exterior to the self. She explains his perspective of memory found in 鈥�things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind.鈥� For Ernaux, however, she finds 鈥� the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.鈥� Duras鈥� The Lover seems to align more with Ernaux, particularly in the fragmented nature of the self as reflected by the narrative style, but also that the external self is a false self that does not serve as a reliable compass towards identity. It is more fit for social hierarchy and posturing, though she also finds this serves a purpose that the interior self cannot achieve. It is only late in life with a 鈥�ravaged face鈥� that she feels her external and internal self align more authentically. A moving and often devastating read, The Lover contains multitudes in its succinct space. It is no wonder this has become a classic work and Duras certainly demonstrates her exemplary prowess of prose and thought.
4.5/5
鈥�And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.鈥�
January 21, 2019
***AWARDED THE 1984 PRIX GONCOURT***
鈥淭he story of my life doesn鈥檛 exist. Does not exist. There鈥檚 never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it鈥檚 not true, there was no one.鈥�
The young Marguerite Duras
She has pretty hair, copper hair that spools down her back in waves of alluring movement. People always comment on how beautiful her hair is which she interprets to mean that they don鈥檛 find her pretty.
She cuts her hair off.
She wears what is left in pigtails. She buys a man鈥檚 hat that is certainly eccentric for a young girl to wear in Saigon in 1929. She wants people to notice her eyes, her lips, certainly something other than her hair. She wants reassurance that her beauty is larger than one exquisite feature.
She is fifteen and a half. Her father is dead. Her mother is poor. Her older brother is a layabout, spoiled by her mother. Her other brother is nice, but no match for the rest of the family. She is lost in a world between adulthood and childhood, a dream world, and a world of harsh realities. Her mother insists that she study mathematics, but she wants to be a writer.
She has a friend at school. A lovely friend totally uninhibited and unaware of how beautiful she is. 鈥滺茅l猫ne Logonelle鈥檚 body is heavy, innocent still, her skin鈥檚 as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can鈥檛 grasp her, she鈥檚 almost illusory, it鈥檚 too much鈥�.I am worn out with desire for H茅l猫ne Logonelle. I am worn out with desire.鈥�
He has a limousine with a chauffeur. He is rich, or let me be more precise, his father is rich. He is Chinese. He is infatuated with her.
He trembles with fear born desire.
She wants them both. 鈥滻鈥檇 like to give H茅l猫ne Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to giver herself where I give myself. It鈥檚 via H茅l猫ne Logonelle鈥檚 body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death.鈥�
Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jane March star in the 1992 French Film.
He is twenty-seven, but it is as if she were older. He is slender, insubstantial, built like a boy. A man trapped in a young mind. Arrested development. 鈥滺e often weeps because he can鈥檛 find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father鈥檚 money.鈥� He is hindered instead of strengthened by his father. He is obsessed with her, with her nubile body, but knows his father will never let him keep her.
鈥漇he wasn鈥檛 sure that she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
This book is based on the real life of Marguerite Donnadieu better known as Marguerite Duras. She was born in Saigon and did have a wealthy, much older, Chinese lover. At fifteen I think most of us believe we will love many people. We will have many exciting affairs of the heart. True love will be a field of flowers not a single stem already residing in the hand. At fifteen, even when we think we are in love, we can鈥檛 know whether it is real. Our basis of comparison is too slender, too new, too wrapped in hormonal need to really know what we feel is love.
I love this picture of Marguerite Duras. The languid, weighted eyelids are a point of fascination.
She wrote this novel at the age of seventy. After fifty-five years I鈥檓 sure that Duras鈥檚 memories have been filtered through many lenses. The sepia tones of her time with her Chinese lover have deepened. The uncertainty is gone and she is left with clear, concise, brush strokes of a commemoration of lost love. This is a novel and from what I read there are deviations from her nonfiction accounts of her first affair, but this book reads of truth. The reader is left with a precise picture of a young woman who may have lost some of her innocence, but gains a self-confidence to break away from her meaningless life and swim for a new shore.
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鈥淭he story of my life doesn鈥檛 exist. Does not exist. There鈥檚 never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it鈥檚 not true, there was no one.鈥�
The young Marguerite Duras
She has pretty hair, copper hair that spools down her back in waves of alluring movement. People always comment on how beautiful her hair is which she interprets to mean that they don鈥檛 find her pretty.
She cuts her hair off.
She wears what is left in pigtails. She buys a man鈥檚 hat that is certainly eccentric for a young girl to wear in Saigon in 1929. She wants people to notice her eyes, her lips, certainly something other than her hair. She wants reassurance that her beauty is larger than one exquisite feature.
She is fifteen and a half. Her father is dead. Her mother is poor. Her older brother is a layabout, spoiled by her mother. Her other brother is nice, but no match for the rest of the family. She is lost in a world between adulthood and childhood, a dream world, and a world of harsh realities. Her mother insists that she study mathematics, but she wants to be a writer.
She has a friend at school. A lovely friend totally uninhibited and unaware of how beautiful she is. 鈥滺茅l猫ne Logonelle鈥檚 body is heavy, innocent still, her skin鈥檚 as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can鈥檛 grasp her, she鈥檚 almost illusory, it鈥檚 too much鈥�.I am worn out with desire for H茅l猫ne Logonelle. I am worn out with desire.鈥�
He has a limousine with a chauffeur. He is rich, or let me be more precise, his father is rich. He is Chinese. He is infatuated with her.
He trembles with fear born desire.
She wants them both. 鈥滻鈥檇 like to give H茅l猫ne Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to giver herself where I give myself. It鈥檚 via H茅l猫ne Logonelle鈥檚 body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death.鈥�
Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jane March star in the 1992 French Film.
He is twenty-seven, but it is as if she were older. He is slender, insubstantial, built like a boy. A man trapped in a young mind. Arrested development. 鈥滺e often weeps because he can鈥檛 find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father鈥檚 money.鈥� He is hindered instead of strengthened by his father. He is obsessed with her, with her nubile body, but knows his father will never let him keep her.
鈥漇he wasn鈥檛 sure that she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
This book is based on the real life of Marguerite Donnadieu better known as Marguerite Duras. She was born in Saigon and did have a wealthy, much older, Chinese lover. At fifteen I think most of us believe we will love many people. We will have many exciting affairs of the heart. True love will be a field of flowers not a single stem already residing in the hand. At fifteen, even when we think we are in love, we can鈥檛 know whether it is real. Our basis of comparison is too slender, too new, too wrapped in hormonal need to really know what we feel is love.
I love this picture of Marguerite Duras. The languid, weighted eyelids are a point of fascination.
She wrote this novel at the age of seventy. After fifty-five years I鈥檓 sure that Duras鈥檚 memories have been filtered through many lenses. The sepia tones of her time with her Chinese lover have deepened. The uncertainty is gone and she is left with clear, concise, brush strokes of a commemoration of lost love. This is a novel and from what I read there are deviations from her nonfiction accounts of her first affair, but this book reads of truth. The reader is left with a precise picture of a young woman who may have lost some of her innocence, but gains a self-confidence to break away from her meaningless life and swim for a new shore.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:
October 22, 2019
I opened the first page of 鈥� , and there she was, the girl with no name with all her ancient reminiscences. I heard her voice as if it were inside my head, Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. How did you get there, my friend? Or should I call you my sister, since from the beginning I discovered we shared anguishes and most certainly a great multitude of passions and dreams?
We both were introduced to this world by tortured mothers, who experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. But their desperation was thoroughly heartfelt, for what can a daughter do when facing a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life鈥檚 happiness, at its most poignant, couldn鈥檛 make them forget it. We daughters recognize them effortlessly as the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn鈥檛 smile. That image of our mothers certainly stayed with both of us for life, my friend. But what can we do, but go on living? I glance outside, and the wind is speeding like my heart is beating, faster and faster, bum, bum, bum, as I get to know you.
But suddenly my mind gets back inside. Yes, I was also there when you met the nameless man while crossing the river going back to Saigon with a storm blowing inside the water. I will never forget how you looked at our first meeting, my friend, wearing a dress of real silk, the famous pair of gold lame high heels and a man鈥檚 flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon. I have to agree with you, The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. You were only fifteen and a half, but wearing powder to camouflage the freckles and your mother鈥檚 lipstick. He was elegant, not a white man but wearing European clothes. Again I remember myself, walking hand in hand with a 26-year-old man when I was just sixteen. Our experiences seem to mimic each other, don鈥檛 you think? But while I had two fine sisters, you had two wild brothers that would never do anything.
Going back to your nameless young man, as you told me he got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at you in the man鈥檚 fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to you. He doesn鈥檛 smile to begin with. He鈥檚 obviously nervous. Was it so easy to get into this man鈥檚 car, dear friend? I don鈥檛 know if I would have had the courage or the temerity. That鈥檚 a clue that even though sisters, we are inherently different. And he presented himself, I was thin and soft and na茂ve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I鈥檓 sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I met you. And you simply got into his car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seized you, weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there鈥檚 a very slight dearness, or fog.
Further memories of those times we shared during one of our meetings, comes running back to me. It is as if I was there with you, peeping into your afternoons. At first he looks at you as though he expects you to speak, but you don鈥檛. He says he loves you madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. You don鈥檛 answer. You could say you don鈥檛 love him. You say nothing. But you did not stop at that, no, you said, I鈥檇 rather you didn鈥檛 love me. But if you do, I鈥檇 like you to do as you usually do with women. He looked at you in horror, asked, Is that what you want? You said it is. He says he knows already you鈥檒l never love him. Then you let him say it. You were a cool one, weren't you?
I look out the window, and now it鈥檚 raining like if it was going to drown us, hiding the sun shining at me. It's dark inside, for nothing could be harder than remembering those times. We who are now almost old ladies, at least well into our mature years. On top of my supposed wisdom, I wonder what is it so mysterious about being a woman. As a matter of fact, I often asked myself that before meeting my first lover at sixteen. Yes, I was some months older than you. Not that it would have made any difference if I could envision what and where that would lead me to. As you said some women just wait, they dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves, dream of romance. long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves. But that was never us; please tell me so. But why could we expect to be different? Did you ever think you might have known, but forgot to tell me? Suddenly inspiration hits me, and I know how we saved ourselves despite our mothers. Do you still remember what you said, some time ago? I think you might have forgotten, let me remind you: it鈥檚 so simple, it was the writing that saved us! You told me how it all started,
I want to write. I鈥檝e already told my mother. That鈥檚 what I want to do鈥搘rite. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, when you鈥檝e got your math degree you can write if you like, it won鈥檛 be anything to do with me then. She鈥檚 against it, it鈥檚 not worthy, it鈥檚 not real work, it鈥檚 nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.
I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She鈥檚 jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I鈥檒l be the first to leave.
I also write, although nobody knows, I am not famous after all. But it saved me nonetheless. But you tried to hide it from me. It鈥檚 ok; I forgive you, my friend. But I remember so well what you said once, I鈥檝e never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
So many years have passed us by, leaving their ignoble scars; but we still reminisce all that went when we were almost children. Yes, you told me I can still see his face, and I do remember the name. The name you forgot to tell me. Indeed, it鈥檚 a place of distress, shipwrecked. And your mother, that went on living even after you left her. Let鈥檚 leave your brothers and my sisters for another talk, please. Or what you told me happened in Paris. Or my years in London and New York. Let鈥檚 leave the rest for another time, for I know with a certainty that goes deep into my bones, that we will meet again. Until then!
__
Notes
1. All quotes are in italics;
2. I took the liberty to change some pronouns to fit the flow of the writing in some quotes; so sometimes it will read 'you' where it was 'her.'
We both were introduced to this world by tortured mothers, who experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. But their desperation was thoroughly heartfelt, for what can a daughter do when facing a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life鈥檚 happiness, at its most poignant, couldn鈥檛 make them forget it. We daughters recognize them effortlessly as the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn鈥檛 smile. That image of our mothers certainly stayed with both of us for life, my friend. But what can we do, but go on living? I glance outside, and the wind is speeding like my heart is beating, faster and faster, bum, bum, bum, as I get to know you.
But suddenly my mind gets back inside. Yes, I was also there when you met the nameless man while crossing the river going back to Saigon with a storm blowing inside the water. I will never forget how you looked at our first meeting, my friend, wearing a dress of real silk, the famous pair of gold lame high heels and a man鈥檚 flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon. I have to agree with you, The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. You were only fifteen and a half, but wearing powder to camouflage the freckles and your mother鈥檚 lipstick. He was elegant, not a white man but wearing European clothes. Again I remember myself, walking hand in hand with a 26-year-old man when I was just sixteen. Our experiences seem to mimic each other, don鈥檛 you think? But while I had two fine sisters, you had two wild brothers that would never do anything.
Going back to your nameless young man, as you told me he got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at you in the man鈥檚 fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to you. He doesn鈥檛 smile to begin with. He鈥檚 obviously nervous. Was it so easy to get into this man鈥檚 car, dear friend? I don鈥檛 know if I would have had the courage or the temerity. That鈥檚 a clue that even though sisters, we are inherently different. And he presented himself, I was thin and soft and na茂ve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I鈥檓 sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I met you. And you simply got into his car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seized you, weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there鈥檚 a very slight dearness, or fog.
Further memories of those times we shared during one of our meetings, comes running back to me. It is as if I was there with you, peeping into your afternoons. At first he looks at you as though he expects you to speak, but you don鈥檛. He says he loves you madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. You don鈥檛 answer. You could say you don鈥檛 love him. You say nothing. But you did not stop at that, no, you said, I鈥檇 rather you didn鈥檛 love me. But if you do, I鈥檇 like you to do as you usually do with women. He looked at you in horror, asked, Is that what you want? You said it is. He says he knows already you鈥檒l never love him. Then you let him say it. You were a cool one, weren't you?
I look out the window, and now it鈥檚 raining like if it was going to drown us, hiding the sun shining at me. It's dark inside, for nothing could be harder than remembering those times. We who are now almost old ladies, at least well into our mature years. On top of my supposed wisdom, I wonder what is it so mysterious about being a woman. As a matter of fact, I often asked myself that before meeting my first lover at sixteen. Yes, I was some months older than you. Not that it would have made any difference if I could envision what and where that would lead me to. As you said some women just wait, they dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves, dream of romance. long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves. But that was never us; please tell me so. But why could we expect to be different? Did you ever think you might have known, but forgot to tell me? Suddenly inspiration hits me, and I know how we saved ourselves despite our mothers. Do you still remember what you said, some time ago? I think you might have forgotten, let me remind you: it鈥檚 so simple, it was the writing that saved us! You told me how it all started,
I want to write. I鈥檝e already told my mother. That鈥檚 what I want to do鈥搘rite. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, when you鈥檝e got your math degree you can write if you like, it won鈥檛 be anything to do with me then. She鈥檚 against it, it鈥檚 not worthy, it鈥檚 not real work, it鈥檚 nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.
I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She鈥檚 jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I鈥檒l be the first to leave.
I also write, although nobody knows, I am not famous after all. But it saved me nonetheless. But you tried to hide it from me. It鈥檚 ok; I forgive you, my friend. But I remember so well what you said once, I鈥檝e never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
So many years have passed us by, leaving their ignoble scars; but we still reminisce all that went when we were almost children. Yes, you told me I can still see his face, and I do remember the name. The name you forgot to tell me. Indeed, it鈥檚 a place of distress, shipwrecked. And your mother, that went on living even after you left her. Let鈥檚 leave your brothers and my sisters for another talk, please. Or what you told me happened in Paris. Or my years in London and New York. Let鈥檚 leave the rest for another time, for I know with a certainty that goes deep into my bones, that we will meet again. Until then!
__
Notes
1. All quotes are in italics;
2. I took the liberty to change some pronouns to fit the flow of the writing in some quotes; so sometimes it will read 'you' where it was 'her.'
December 28, 2018
i found myself utterly muted by this book, which is problematic because the book club meets this friday, and they aren't going to be so dazzled by my bruschetta that i can get away with just hiding behind the tiny jewess and drinking their wine. so i have to think of something.
consulting the "reading group handbook" by rachel w. jacobsohn, bought for my final school assignment, i learn how to think about literature:
characters and story line: young french girl, older chinese man falling into bed and clinical love without names in indochina.
character's actions: she has poor unsatisfying home life, he has rich traditional home life. they bang. everything seems muffled by gauze.
reader's emotional response: unmoved. if the author's voice is going to be so removed, and the characters aren't going to feel anything particularly deep, why should i be expected to have emotions? it's like watching people fucking with a wall in between them, masturbating at each other. resentfully.
narrative: fragmentary, past/present conflation, surface-emotions only. short, poetic musings which are occasionally quite lyrical, but never caught at me.
oh, man, i have zero to say about it. i don't know - people love this book, but i am not one of them. wish me luck.
readers, thinkers and drinkers jan 2010.
consulting the "reading group handbook" by rachel w. jacobsohn, bought for my final school assignment, i learn how to think about literature:
characters and story line: young french girl, older chinese man falling into bed and clinical love without names in indochina.
character's actions: she has poor unsatisfying home life, he has rich traditional home life. they bang. everything seems muffled by gauze.
reader's emotional response: unmoved. if the author's voice is going to be so removed, and the characters aren't going to feel anything particularly deep, why should i be expected to have emotions? it's like watching people fucking with a wall in between them, masturbating at each other. resentfully.
narrative: fragmentary, past/present conflation, surface-emotions only. short, poetic musings which are occasionally quite lyrical, but never caught at me.
oh, man, i have zero to say about it. i don't know - people love this book, but i am not one of them. wish me luck.
readers, thinkers and drinkers jan 2010.
December 5, 2019
And the time comes, when we鈥檝e to make peace with our past, to let go of moments we cherished dearly, or of those which brought torment endless, the love we lived or the one we denied emphatically, the people we admired foolishly and the ones we鈥檇 to abandon, things fall apart and what is left are the crumbled spikes we call memories. And time comes, when those fragmented pieces of the past are to be jotted down, the unspoken tale to be spoken after all, to let out the stories inside us, not to seek a sympathetic heart or to moan over our losses, we say our hearts just for the sake of saying, to breathe freely, to be at peace. Here is the tale told in most apathetic fashion, touching the innermost chords of the flesh in us which beats with the same rhythm as of the indifferent narrator, after all we鈥檝e all been the lovers and we鈥檝e loved 鈥淎 love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime鈥ever.鈥�
There鈥檚 nothing new in the tale, if you鈥檙e looking for a love story you鈥檙e gravely mistaken. There鈥檚 no such love nor the story. The kind of love that starts with dewy glances and perturbs hearts, the kind of love with the happy ending of togetherness, or the kind of love that longs for the beloved in dark nights with juices flowing down the loins, marguerite pens down events from her childhood in most detached of voices, hers is not the lush style with poetic diction, there鈥檚 a marked dispassion in the tone and daunting flair in descriptions of her Indochina which is Vietnam today, and of her Chinese lover, a man of twenty-seven besotted by the skinny French girl of fifteen who hides her poverty-stricken face under a Manish hat, who wears clothes that were in fashion a dozen years ago, who has a body of a child and no flesh to attract men but a face of a half goddess and half prostitute, veiled behind his limousine glass, the lover falls for her in a fair morning in his way to cholon, he can never marry her ,he tells the child every time he makes love to her, this stripped naked reality saddens the most erotic of scenes too.
Like a father he tends to her needs, like a lover he worships her passionately, as for her, she鈥檚 found a haven in him, a home away from home, from those desperately poor people that are her family, the child loves his skin as he loves her untainted soul, they never promise nothing, they weave no future, as the lovers know, they have none. Sometimes we just want to lie next to someone and sleep, knowing our hearts are safe, the surety of sharing the same sky appeases much, as duras penned it down in her 70s, her heart must鈥檝e been swelled with the thought of her lover, the faded face, the gone fragrance, the screaming silence, of her war-ravaged Saigon:
I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.
He will always feel the same for her, he said..
There鈥檚 nothing new in the tale, if you鈥檙e looking for a love story you鈥檙e gravely mistaken. There鈥檚 no such love nor the story. The kind of love that starts with dewy glances and perturbs hearts, the kind of love with the happy ending of togetherness, or the kind of love that longs for the beloved in dark nights with juices flowing down the loins, marguerite pens down events from her childhood in most detached of voices, hers is not the lush style with poetic diction, there鈥檚 a marked dispassion in the tone and daunting flair in descriptions of her Indochina which is Vietnam today, and of her Chinese lover, a man of twenty-seven besotted by the skinny French girl of fifteen who hides her poverty-stricken face under a Manish hat, who wears clothes that were in fashion a dozen years ago, who has a body of a child and no flesh to attract men but a face of a half goddess and half prostitute, veiled behind his limousine glass, the lover falls for her in a fair morning in his way to cholon, he can never marry her ,he tells the child every time he makes love to her, this stripped naked reality saddens the most erotic of scenes too.
Like a father he tends to her needs, like a lover he worships her passionately, as for her, she鈥檚 found a haven in him, a home away from home, from those desperately poor people that are her family, the child loves his skin as he loves her untainted soul, they never promise nothing, they weave no future, as the lovers know, they have none. Sometimes we just want to lie next to someone and sleep, knowing our hearts are safe, the surety of sharing the same sky appeases much, as duras penned it down in her 70s, her heart must鈥檝e been swelled with the thought of her lover, the faded face, the gone fragrance, the screaming silence, of her war-ravaged Saigon:
I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.
He will always feel the same for her, he said..
May 11, 2015
Who is 鈥淟鈥檃尘补苍迟鈥�(*)? The characters in this story are nameless. A puzzle of personal pronouns draws an anonymous canvas that perspires with alienation and the dense humidity of a foreign land, that mourns the loss of youth and innocence, that invokes the image of photographs never taken, the sound of words never uttered and the mirage of a future that never existed. Only the condensed ardour that clouds up the windows of a small hotel room, where two slippery bodies abandon themselves to contorting passion, defies reality and the passage of time.
But who is 鈥淭he Lover鈥�?
Is 鈥淭he Lover鈥� the fifteen-years-old tomboy standing in front to the ferry hiding her prematurely wrinkled face under the shadow of a man鈥檚 fedora hat?
She never expected to fall in love with him. She was only worn out with desire. And her dysfunctional family of European colonizers needed the money.
Is 鈥淭he Lover鈥� the wealthy Chinese man of twenty-seven years of age from Cholen who adores the girl from the distance, concealed behind the tainted windows of his father鈥檚 black limousine?
He undresses her with trembling fingers and weeps in the exile of his illegitimate love. He is ashamed of his weakness. She kisses his fragility and ruins the rest of his life.
At first I thought 鈥淭he Lover鈥� was she.
Then I realized it was he.
And finally I understood it was much more.
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is a movable portrait of a first person narrator who is visiting a succession of her younger selves. Memories are her brushstrokes and life-consuming longing the color in which she paints her pictorial story. The awakening of first love and the discovery of erotic pleasure arrive hand in hand with the heartbreak of a certain separation, the sentence to life imprisonment by familial duty and the ruthlessness of intransigent tradition. The cultural distance between the local people and the colonizers in French Indochina become the backdrop of a love story that is condemned by history before it even started and the detached irony that drips from the narrator鈥檚 voice can鈥檛 disguise the desolation that is eating her alive underneath a carefully studied, impassive poise.
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is a cascade of musical notes delivered in fluid movements, a whirlwind of words repeated like a mantra in breathless cadence and staccatto punctuation . 鈥淭he Lover鈥� is more than a semi autobiographical memoir and less than an interior monologue. It is the rawness of impressionistic paragraphs capturing in Polaroid snapshots the obsession of a crazed mother, the chauvinistic abuse of an elder brother and the alternating urgency and resigned languidness that leaves a permanent scar on the features of a young woman.
Yes. The tale has been told countless times before.
But never like this.
Never the vessel set sail in the Mekong River amidst deafening heat, chirping jungles and melting sky annihilatating all color.
Never the salty tears drowned the sob in torrents of silence and immobility while Chopin鈥檚 notes tinted the breath of the wind onboard.
Never the throbbing heartbreak was replaced by incandescent prose that palpitated to the rhythm of the distant voice of China.
Never the fate of two lovers who never spoke to each other, would be sealed with only two words.
(*) I read Marguerite Duras鈥� novella in Catalan translated from the French by Marta Pessarrodona.
But who is 鈥淭he Lover鈥�?
Is 鈥淭he Lover鈥� the fifteen-years-old tomboy standing in front to the ferry hiding her prematurely wrinkled face under the shadow of a man鈥檚 fedora hat?
She never expected to fall in love with him. She was only worn out with desire. And her dysfunctional family of European colonizers needed the money.
Is 鈥淭he Lover鈥� the wealthy Chinese man of twenty-seven years of age from Cholen who adores the girl from the distance, concealed behind the tainted windows of his father鈥檚 black limousine?
He undresses her with trembling fingers and weeps in the exile of his illegitimate love. He is ashamed of his weakness. She kisses his fragility and ruins the rest of his life.
At first I thought 鈥淭he Lover鈥� was she.
Then I realized it was he.
And finally I understood it was much more.
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is a movable portrait of a first person narrator who is visiting a succession of her younger selves. Memories are her brushstrokes and life-consuming longing the color in which she paints her pictorial story. The awakening of first love and the discovery of erotic pleasure arrive hand in hand with the heartbreak of a certain separation, the sentence to life imprisonment by familial duty and the ruthlessness of intransigent tradition. The cultural distance between the local people and the colonizers in French Indochina become the backdrop of a love story that is condemned by history before it even started and the detached irony that drips from the narrator鈥檚 voice can鈥檛 disguise the desolation that is eating her alive underneath a carefully studied, impassive poise.
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is a cascade of musical notes delivered in fluid movements, a whirlwind of words repeated like a mantra in breathless cadence and staccatto punctuation . 鈥淭he Lover鈥� is more than a semi autobiographical memoir and less than an interior monologue. It is the rawness of impressionistic paragraphs capturing in Polaroid snapshots the obsession of a crazed mother, the chauvinistic abuse of an elder brother and the alternating urgency and resigned languidness that leaves a permanent scar on the features of a young woman.
Yes. The tale has been told countless times before.
But never like this.
Never the vessel set sail in the Mekong River amidst deafening heat, chirping jungles and melting sky annihilatating all color.
Never the salty tears drowned the sob in torrents of silence and immobility while Chopin鈥檚 notes tinted the breath of the wind onboard.
Never the throbbing heartbreak was replaced by incandescent prose that palpitated to the rhythm of the distant voice of China.
Never the fate of two lovers who never spoke to each other, would be sealed with only two words.
(*) I read Marguerite Duras鈥� novella in Catalan translated from the French by Marta Pessarrodona.
December 6, 2022
imagine if lolita was written by dolores and also it was autobiographical.
goodness gracious.
this is a very beautifully written and, as you'd expect, very disturbing book. at times it feels confusing and even surreal, which is ultimately an effective storytelling mechanism when you consider the content, even if and maybe because it makes it difficult to read.
bottom line: sheesh.
------------------
currently-reading updates
reading this on the train in an attempt to be the most interesting girl on board
goodness gracious.
this is a very beautifully written and, as you'd expect, very disturbing book. at times it feels confusing and even surreal, which is ultimately an effective storytelling mechanism when you consider the content, even if and maybe because it makes it difficult to read.
bottom line: sheesh.
------------------
currently-reading updates
reading this on the train in an attempt to be the most interesting girl on board
January 29, 2021
I'm unclear on why this little novel was given the title The Lover.
Why the Lover?
This story has barely anything to do with him.
Who it is about: the young woman, the old woman, the girl who had the lover.
This distinction is important: the unnamed protagonist's age and status are perpetually changing and not in any particular order.
The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.
This is a story told in a stream-of-consciousness. . . completely non-linear, no distinguished dialogue, either.
And, a far more appropriate title for it would be: Surrounded by Sociopaths.
This would be a fantastic book for psychologists to read; it's a multi-generational account of a parent with a mental illness raising children who then suffer from untreated attachment disorders.
I'm no psychologist; I'm always in this reading and writing business for the characters and the stories, but I can't help but be fascinated by these people.
Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply it's impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don't even look at one another.
This isn't the Partridge family, folks, and your family of origin will most likely look a lot better, in comparison.
Oh, and in case you're like me and you picked up this book hoping for some guilt-free, pandemic sex:
Hahahahahahahahahahaha. (I'm laughing at you and me).
Don't let the title and/or the bizarre three pages of a completely out of context, girl-on-girl fantasy segment mislead you.
Ain't nothing sexy about a girl suffering from attachment disorder who avoids her brother so he won't rape her staring up blankly at the ceiling while her 鈥渓over鈥� must make love to fight against fear.
Ugh! Why must fictional sex be as complicated as real sex??
But (and this may surprise you, given some of my gripes), the writing was fascinating. Fascinating. I have post-it notes all over my copy. Marguerite Duras was a trendsetter and a poet. This is a bold work of 鈥渟emi-autobiographical鈥� fiction filled with inspired images and memorable lines.
In fact, the last line made me bite down so hard on my finger, hot tears spilled out of the corners of my eyes.
Ms. Duras wasn't just playing.
Why the Lover?
This story has barely anything to do with him.
Who it is about: the young woman, the old woman, the girl who had the lover.
This distinction is important: the unnamed protagonist's age and status are perpetually changing and not in any particular order.
The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.
This is a story told in a stream-of-consciousness. . . completely non-linear, no distinguished dialogue, either.
And, a far more appropriate title for it would be: Surrounded by Sociopaths.
This would be a fantastic book for psychologists to read; it's a multi-generational account of a parent with a mental illness raising children who then suffer from untreated attachment disorders.
I'm no psychologist; I'm always in this reading and writing business for the characters and the stories, but I can't help but be fascinated by these people.
Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply it's impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don't even look at one another.
This isn't the Partridge family, folks, and your family of origin will most likely look a lot better, in comparison.
Oh, and in case you're like me and you picked up this book hoping for some guilt-free, pandemic sex:
Hahahahahahahahahahaha. (I'm laughing at you and me).
Don't let the title and/or the bizarre three pages of a completely out of context, girl-on-girl fantasy segment mislead you.
Ain't nothing sexy about a girl suffering from attachment disorder who avoids her brother so he won't rape her staring up blankly at the ceiling while her 鈥渓over鈥� must make love to fight against fear.
Ugh! Why must fictional sex be as complicated as real sex??
But (and this may surprise you, given some of my gripes), the writing was fascinating. Fascinating. I have post-it notes all over my copy. Marguerite Duras was a trendsetter and a poet. This is a bold work of 鈥渟emi-autobiographical鈥� fiction filled with inspired images and memorable lines.
In fact, the last line made me bite down so hard on my finger, hot tears spilled out of the corners of my eyes.
Ms. Duras wasn't just playing.
June 11, 2024
I think I'm beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I've never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.
***
And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she'd been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn鈥檛 a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in turn, throw herself in turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn鈥檛 sure she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.
***
And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she'd been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn鈥檛 a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in turn, throw herself in turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn鈥檛 sure she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.
December 5, 2019
鈥�Very early in my life it was too late.鈥�
and
鈥�Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.鈥�
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There鈥檚 an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, H茅l猫ne Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard鈥檚 The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I鈥檝e not seen (.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old 鈥渕an from Cholon鈥� after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
鈥�He breathes her in, the child鈥�
It鈥檚 not like other bodies, it鈥檚 not finished鈥�
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up鈥�
I became his child.鈥�
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert鈥檚 deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what鈥檚 going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
鈥�How can innocence be disgraced?鈥�
So asks her mother, when her daughter鈥檚 relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn鈥檛 - and won鈥檛 ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won鈥檛 even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (.)
In 18 months, they don鈥檛 talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong 鈥�Love... in its first violence鈥�!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras鈥� interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
鈥� When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
鈥� She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
鈥� She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
鈥� But she also writes that she鈥檚 鈥�where she has to be, placed here鈥�, which sounds like less of a choice.
鈥� Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
鈥�She doesn鈥檛 feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it鈥檚 already desire.鈥�
Ambiguous Truth
鈥�The story of my life does not exist.鈥�
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 鈥�that might have been taken鈥�, but wasn鈥檛. In it, her clothes were chosen for 鈥�crucial ambiguity鈥�. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she鈥檇 caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, , in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
鈥� 鈥淭he light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour鈥� and at night 鈥渢he light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淚t鈥檚 not that you have to achieve anything, it鈥檚 that you have to get away from where you are.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淲hen I was a child my mother鈥檚 unhappiness took the place of dreams.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淭heir disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death鈥� the mysterious death of lovers without love.鈥�
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who鈥檝e had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family鈥檚 acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it鈥檚 barely 100 pages, it鈥檚 best read in one or two sittings.
and
鈥�Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.鈥�
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There鈥檚 an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, H茅l猫ne Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard鈥檚 The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I鈥檝e not seen (.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old 鈥渕an from Cholon鈥� after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
鈥�He breathes her in, the child鈥�
It鈥檚 not like other bodies, it鈥檚 not finished鈥�
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up鈥�
I became his child.鈥�
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert鈥檚 deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what鈥檚 going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
鈥�How can innocence be disgraced?鈥�
So asks her mother, when her daughter鈥檚 relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn鈥檛 - and won鈥檛 ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won鈥檛 even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (.)
In 18 months, they don鈥檛 talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong 鈥�Love... in its first violence鈥�!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras鈥� interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
鈥� When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
鈥� She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
鈥� She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
鈥� But she also writes that she鈥檚 鈥�where she has to be, placed here鈥�, which sounds like less of a choice.
鈥� Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
鈥�She doesn鈥檛 feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it鈥檚 already desire.鈥�
Ambiguous Truth
鈥�The story of my life does not exist.鈥�
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 鈥�that might have been taken鈥�, but wasn鈥檛. In it, her clothes were chosen for 鈥�crucial ambiguity鈥�. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she鈥檇 caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, , in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
鈥� 鈥淭he light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour鈥� and at night 鈥渢he light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淚t鈥檚 not that you have to achieve anything, it鈥檚 that you have to get away from where you are.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淲hen I was a child my mother鈥檚 unhappiness took the place of dreams.鈥�
鈥� 鈥淭heir disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death鈥� the mysterious death of lovers without love.鈥�
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who鈥檝e had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family鈥檚 acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it鈥檚 barely 100 pages, it鈥檚 best read in one or two sittings.
May 22, 2020
A world away from the intelligence insulting and glorified trash of E. L. James, Marguerite Duras has written a sparse, minimal and painfully sad erotic love story that never gets drawn into the realms of romantic fantasy.
And to deeply appreciate 'The Lover', it needs to be looked at from the perspective of Duras herself. Pen was put to paper when she was 70, it's predominantly all about looking back on memories past, and I say it's a painful read, painful in respects to nostalgia, as nostalgia forms the basis for the story that has origins from her actual youth while living in French Indochina, age fifteen she fell in love with a rich Chinese man. Duras takes this premise and places a white teenage girl in South Vietnam, into the arms of a wealthy older man who catches her eye while been driven in a limousine. But this is a forbidden love that was always doomed, trying to keep secret from her mother and two brothers she would regularly meet with her lover for moments of passionate bliss.
Duras stays away from any attention seeking sexual content, and never covers ground of what's right or wrong, just tells the simple tale of innocence lost. The narrative at times appears broken, and there is little in the way of dialogue, but his only helps to fortify the reading experience of it feeling like a distant dream.
After being Oscar nominated for her screenplay on the Alain Resnais film classic 'Hiroshima mon amour', Duras would rightly win Frances most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and she will always remains a significant French writer.
And to deeply appreciate 'The Lover', it needs to be looked at from the perspective of Duras herself. Pen was put to paper when she was 70, it's predominantly all about looking back on memories past, and I say it's a painful read, painful in respects to nostalgia, as nostalgia forms the basis for the story that has origins from her actual youth while living in French Indochina, age fifteen she fell in love with a rich Chinese man. Duras takes this premise and places a white teenage girl in South Vietnam, into the arms of a wealthy older man who catches her eye while been driven in a limousine. But this is a forbidden love that was always doomed, trying to keep secret from her mother and two brothers she would regularly meet with her lover for moments of passionate bliss.
Duras stays away from any attention seeking sexual content, and never covers ground of what's right or wrong, just tells the simple tale of innocence lost. The narrative at times appears broken, and there is little in the way of dialogue, but his only helps to fortify the reading experience of it feeling like a distant dream.
After being Oscar nominated for her screenplay on the Alain Resnais film classic 'Hiroshima mon amour', Duras would rightly win Frances most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and she will always remains a significant French writer.
June 27, 2017
This is a thin novella, but do not expect an easy read. Though translated from the original French, you will experience an almost immediate halt, like you are reading something in a different language. And you are. It is the language of dreams. It is also the language of recollection. It does not flow in a typical fashion: it dips you in a moment then pulls you out just as you are getting used to the temperature of the water. It plunges you into another time and place, emoting a feeling out of context and once again as you are getting your bearings, the scene changes again.
Marguerite Duras wrote this as an older woman, and it's clear that this is heavily autobiographical. These are remembrances of herself at 15 and a half years young, and her erotic love affair with a 27 year old wealthy Chinese man. Again, the reader halts. 15? 27? Ick? A different time? Can we peer in on their affair without feeling uncomfortable? I'm not altogether sure. Yes, she's mature beyond her years. Yes, she seems to be the one in charge. For me though, it treads the razor's edge of true-life , with his uncontrollable love for this girl, with his tearful, sexual obsession.
There's a blurry child prostitute image I keep seeing, a child with gold lam茅 heels and a pinkish brown fedora. A girl being dropped off at school in her lover's limousine. An unphotographed, lonely and serious girl, whose family life has sucked the childhood out of her. Her father has died, her mother is mentally ill and is barely keeping the family afloat in manageable poverty, her older brother beats her. She looks back at this time with her Chinese lover as the pivotal time in her life. She tells him she will never love him. She tells him she is with him because of his money.
She believes it, when she says it. She takes the money. Her family devours the meals he pays for, wordlessly. She is unprepared for the shifting clouds, the imperceptible variations of the heart, carried on the notes of a Chopin waltz, that there was love, that love "was lost in the affair like water in sand". This love defines her, even into old age.
A poetic, powerful, dreamy glance back at a love affair, painful in its secrecy, in its illicitness, in its doomed fate.
3.5 stars
Marguerite Duras wrote this as an older woman, and it's clear that this is heavily autobiographical. These are remembrances of herself at 15 and a half years young, and her erotic love affair with a 27 year old wealthy Chinese man. Again, the reader halts. 15? 27? Ick? A different time? Can we peer in on their affair without feeling uncomfortable? I'm not altogether sure. Yes, she's mature beyond her years. Yes, she seems to be the one in charge. For me though, it treads the razor's edge of true-life , with his uncontrollable love for this girl, with his tearful, sexual obsession.
There's a blurry child prostitute image I keep seeing, a child with gold lam茅 heels and a pinkish brown fedora. A girl being dropped off at school in her lover's limousine. An unphotographed, lonely and serious girl, whose family life has sucked the childhood out of her. Her father has died, her mother is mentally ill and is barely keeping the family afloat in manageable poverty, her older brother beats her. She looks back at this time with her Chinese lover as the pivotal time in her life. She tells him she will never love him. She tells him she is with him because of his money.
She believes it, when she says it. She takes the money. Her family devours the meals he pays for, wordlessly. She is unprepared for the shifting clouds, the imperceptible variations of the heart, carried on the notes of a Chopin waltz, that there was love, that love "was lost in the affair like water in sand". This love defines her, even into old age.
A poetic, powerful, dreamy glance back at a love affair, painful in its secrecy, in its illicitness, in its doomed fate.
3.5 stars
February 2, 2024
A charming little novel to read! We peacefully revisit the old memories of the author, in particular, the memories of her first love and her somewhat problematic relationship with her mother and big brother. The author remembers the troubles of her adolescence, the discovery of her body and sexuality, and her relationship with an older adult when she was only 15 years old. Not only the age but also the culture separates them because it is Chinese. At the age of 15, Marguerite wants to chart a course for her life to get away from her family. She cannot take any more of this life, led by a mother overwhelmed by her responsibilities as head of the family, an absent father, and a dishonest brother. The latter uses the excessive love of the mother to commit reprehensible acts. At the age of 15, Marguerite is almost a woman.
Read in one go. The Lover is an atypical book that I liked!
Read in one go. The Lover is an atypical book that I liked!
April 10, 2012
fragmented, drab, and full of unpleasant people. had a nice part about a hat though.
February 18, 2013
Desire
The first time ever I saw your face was on the ferry.
I had my head buried in a copy of the South China Morning Post. My father had said, if I read it every day, I would learn about the world around us, and his boy would become a man. Only then would I be ready to take over the family business after him.
He was right, in his way. I was thin and soft and na茂ve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I鈥檓 sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I had met you.
I had slept with many girls in Paris, and I bedded plenty more after you, before I married my wife, a virgin until our wedding night. But I didn't sleep with any of these girls out of love or even desire. I fucked them because I could. They came to me eager to be fucked, and we all knew the reason, my family鈥檚 wealth and increasing prominence in Saigon. They all came to me, because they wanted something that my father had.
My father was not an egotistical man. He did not display pride or shame. He did everything out of duty, even make money, buy property, run a department store and build wealth. But when it came to the girls I slept with (not you), and he always found out about them, he took some delight in my sexual activity. No matter how attractive each one was, he knew that by sleeping with them, I was actually disqualifying them from the race to be my wife and share his wealth. Everyone I slept with narrowed it down to the one I would eventually marry.
I looked up from the Post, some article on inflation, and I saw you taking a seat opposite me. I gazed at you longer than I should have.
Everything about you was wrong. You were Caucasian, white, 15 陆 years old, slim, you were wearing a flowing dress that alternately swayed in the breeze or clung to your body, outlining and highlighting your petite breasts. And you were wearing a man鈥檚 fedora and gold shoes.
Once I took all of this in, I tried to resume reading the Post. I was looking down at the page, but I couldn鈥檛 distinguish a single word, I was thinking of you and I was shaking. Like a boy.
Later the same week, we happened to be on the same ferry again. I didn鈥檛 see you on board, but when my father鈥檚 driver (until recently, when he retired, my driver) opened the door to the limousine, I noticed that you were standing near the waterline, apparently deciding what you would do next.
I went up to you, determined to offer you a ride in my car, I mean my father鈥檚 car. You were apprehensive at first, but I reassured you of my good faith, and you decided to accept. It helped that I was shaking the whole way through our brief discussion.
While we were talking, we stood side on, so that my driver could see both of us, the sides of our faces and the hints of nervous smiles. Something must have touched him, unless he did it out of a sense of duty to my father, for he took a photo of us that day.
He gave it to me when he retired 10 years ago. I have carried it with me, in my wallet, every day since then. Until today, I haven鈥檛 pulled it out and looked at it again. I didn鈥檛 need to. That moment, in my eyes, has been engraved in my mind for fifty years. The only difference is that the image confirms that I was there, that it wasn鈥檛 all in my imagination, you can see both of us. The image is true, and so now is my memory. Only I鈥檓 not sure whether I ever wanted to be reminded.
It鈥檚 not that the photo reminds me of a time when I was a boy. After all, it was you who made me a man, not reading the Post.
Like my father before me, I am a man of duty. I have faithfully taken care of my wife, my family, my family鈥檚 business. Everything has grown under my watchful and caring eye. I have done the right thing, and I will die a contented man, if contentment is what I am looking for.
No, what that photo and that moment remind me of is my capacity for desire. It is something I eliminated from my field of vision after we parted company, at my parents鈥� insistence, and you returned to Paris, I thought, with your mother.
I already knew the rudimentary mechanics of sex when we stood before each other, a skinny Chinese boy and a skinny French girl, in my bedroom for the first time. As I had done before, I was shaking. Even my tentative erection looked as if it might shake off and fall to the floor. It鈥檚 funny now, but it wasn鈥檛 funny then.
Until I met you, I had been lonely. I was even lonelier after I had met you, because of the obsessive love I had for you.
You said, 鈥淚鈥檇 rather you didn鈥檛 love me, but if you do, I鈥檇 like you to do as you usually do with women.鈥�
I asked, 鈥淚s that what you want?鈥�
You nodded. Still I knew that you would never love me, that you could never love me.
I said, 鈥淵ou鈥檝e come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone.鈥�
You replied, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 say, so far I鈥檝e never gone into a bedroom with anyone.鈥�
You begged me, again, to do what I usually did with the women I brought to my room.
I did my best to comply. Although you were a virgin, I made love to you the way you directed me to. It was different to how I normally did it, well there was one difference, I wept while we made love.
The driver soon learned about you, and so did my father. He could tell I felt differently about you, that I wasn鈥檛 disqualifying you, that I wanted to marry this white girl, even though you would never love me in return.
He made his position very clear.
鈥淚 will not let my son marry this little white whore from Sadec.鈥�
I tried to obliterate his attitude from my thinking. But it must have affected me subliminally.
In bed, as we fucked more and more passionately, I would call out, 鈥淢y whore, my slut, you are my only love.鈥� And you and I and my cum and your juices and our sweat would be swept up in a torrent of desire.
For a long time, it seemed as if that torrent would never stop. I didn鈥檛 know where the waters sprang from, but I definitely didn鈥檛 know where they were heading.
My father did, and so he built a dam that would contain the flow, and one day the torrent just stopped.
Loving you had made me a man, he knew that, as I did, and although we disagreed wildly, I was reconciled to my future in the family business.
As my father loosened his grip on the reins and handed them over to me, I expanded to two and then eventually five department stores, and then years later with such a solid foundation, I started investing in shopping centres in Australia, until my family became the largest private holder of retail real estate in the country.
Like my father, I am not an egotistical man or a proud one. I do this because of duty. But there was a moment when I contented myself with a smile.
I had just signed a contract to purchase a centre in Australia for A$30 million. I signed a cheque for a A$3M deposit and gave it to the Vendor鈥檚 lawyer. A youngish fellow, he decided to phone my banker and ask whether I had sufficient funds in my account to clear the cheque. The banker asked what the total sale price was. The lawyer answered, and my banker laughed. 鈥淭here are enough funds in this account to pay the entire sale price in cash.鈥�
The lawyer turned to me, squeamishly, and declared that we had a deal. I said, 鈥淚 was under the impression we had a deal before you phoned my bank.鈥�
I enquired after that lawyer once. It turned out he had married one of my property managers and was now running a coffee shop, ironically in one of my centres.
I have two daughters. They run our portfolio, and they do a more professional job of it than either I or my father ever did.
Perhaps, my father was better at taking risks than they are, but to be honest they are pretty good at it. I am proud of them, and he would be too. They have married well, and have given me four beautiful grandchildren.
As I said, I have carried our photo in my wallet for many years, ever since I learned of its existence.
Any other man in my position would possibly say that they had everything that they had ever desired.
For me, that is true, except in one sense that I have tried to overlook for fifty years.
I once desired you, that skinny white French girl in the fedora. I desired you with an intensity that I cannot find words to describe.
I have tried to rationalise and deny that desire. I鈥檝e tried to convince myself that I only ever desired you once. And that is actually the truth. I did only desire you once, but that one occasion has lasted fifty years.
Now that I am about to die, or think I am, and my family will soon gather around me to say their farewells, I must take a match to this photo and set it alight, like you once set me alight, and perhaps, I will never know, perhaps I also set you alight, if not for as long.
My favourite nurse just brought me an ashtray and a cigarette lighter.
It took me two or three attempts to burn this image. It didn鈥檛 seem to want to go.
But now it is finished and there are only ashes in the tray, and my failing memory, and when I die and it too goes, there will be nothing left of our desire.
Mural at the Pawpaw Cafe attached to the Brisbane Restaurant "Green Papaya"
The first time ever I saw your face was on the ferry.
I had my head buried in a copy of the South China Morning Post. My father had said, if I read it every day, I would learn about the world around us, and his boy would become a man. Only then would I be ready to take over the family business after him.
He was right, in his way. I was thin and soft and na茂ve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I鈥檓 sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I had met you.
I had slept with many girls in Paris, and I bedded plenty more after you, before I married my wife, a virgin until our wedding night. But I didn't sleep with any of these girls out of love or even desire. I fucked them because I could. They came to me eager to be fucked, and we all knew the reason, my family鈥檚 wealth and increasing prominence in Saigon. They all came to me, because they wanted something that my father had.
My father was not an egotistical man. He did not display pride or shame. He did everything out of duty, even make money, buy property, run a department store and build wealth. But when it came to the girls I slept with (not you), and he always found out about them, he took some delight in my sexual activity. No matter how attractive each one was, he knew that by sleeping with them, I was actually disqualifying them from the race to be my wife and share his wealth. Everyone I slept with narrowed it down to the one I would eventually marry.
I looked up from the Post, some article on inflation, and I saw you taking a seat opposite me. I gazed at you longer than I should have.
Everything about you was wrong. You were Caucasian, white, 15 陆 years old, slim, you were wearing a flowing dress that alternately swayed in the breeze or clung to your body, outlining and highlighting your petite breasts. And you were wearing a man鈥檚 fedora and gold shoes.
Once I took all of this in, I tried to resume reading the Post. I was looking down at the page, but I couldn鈥檛 distinguish a single word, I was thinking of you and I was shaking. Like a boy.
Later the same week, we happened to be on the same ferry again. I didn鈥檛 see you on board, but when my father鈥檚 driver (until recently, when he retired, my driver) opened the door to the limousine, I noticed that you were standing near the waterline, apparently deciding what you would do next.
I went up to you, determined to offer you a ride in my car, I mean my father鈥檚 car. You were apprehensive at first, but I reassured you of my good faith, and you decided to accept. It helped that I was shaking the whole way through our brief discussion.
While we were talking, we stood side on, so that my driver could see both of us, the sides of our faces and the hints of nervous smiles. Something must have touched him, unless he did it out of a sense of duty to my father, for he took a photo of us that day.
He gave it to me when he retired 10 years ago. I have carried it with me, in my wallet, every day since then. Until today, I haven鈥檛 pulled it out and looked at it again. I didn鈥檛 need to. That moment, in my eyes, has been engraved in my mind for fifty years. The only difference is that the image confirms that I was there, that it wasn鈥檛 all in my imagination, you can see both of us. The image is true, and so now is my memory. Only I鈥檓 not sure whether I ever wanted to be reminded.
It鈥檚 not that the photo reminds me of a time when I was a boy. After all, it was you who made me a man, not reading the Post.
Like my father before me, I am a man of duty. I have faithfully taken care of my wife, my family, my family鈥檚 business. Everything has grown under my watchful and caring eye. I have done the right thing, and I will die a contented man, if contentment is what I am looking for.
No, what that photo and that moment remind me of is my capacity for desire. It is something I eliminated from my field of vision after we parted company, at my parents鈥� insistence, and you returned to Paris, I thought, with your mother.
I already knew the rudimentary mechanics of sex when we stood before each other, a skinny Chinese boy and a skinny French girl, in my bedroom for the first time. As I had done before, I was shaking. Even my tentative erection looked as if it might shake off and fall to the floor. It鈥檚 funny now, but it wasn鈥檛 funny then.
Until I met you, I had been lonely. I was even lonelier after I had met you, because of the obsessive love I had for you.
You said, 鈥淚鈥檇 rather you didn鈥檛 love me, but if you do, I鈥檇 like you to do as you usually do with women.鈥�
I asked, 鈥淚s that what you want?鈥�
You nodded. Still I knew that you would never love me, that you could never love me.
I said, 鈥淵ou鈥檝e come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone.鈥�
You replied, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 say, so far I鈥檝e never gone into a bedroom with anyone.鈥�
You begged me, again, to do what I usually did with the women I brought to my room.
I did my best to comply. Although you were a virgin, I made love to you the way you directed me to. It was different to how I normally did it, well there was one difference, I wept while we made love.
The driver soon learned about you, and so did my father. He could tell I felt differently about you, that I wasn鈥檛 disqualifying you, that I wanted to marry this white girl, even though you would never love me in return.
He made his position very clear.
鈥淚 will not let my son marry this little white whore from Sadec.鈥�
I tried to obliterate his attitude from my thinking. But it must have affected me subliminally.
In bed, as we fucked more and more passionately, I would call out, 鈥淢y whore, my slut, you are my only love.鈥� And you and I and my cum and your juices and our sweat would be swept up in a torrent of desire.
For a long time, it seemed as if that torrent would never stop. I didn鈥檛 know where the waters sprang from, but I definitely didn鈥檛 know where they were heading.
My father did, and so he built a dam that would contain the flow, and one day the torrent just stopped.
Loving you had made me a man, he knew that, as I did, and although we disagreed wildly, I was reconciled to my future in the family business.
As my father loosened his grip on the reins and handed them over to me, I expanded to two and then eventually five department stores, and then years later with such a solid foundation, I started investing in shopping centres in Australia, until my family became the largest private holder of retail real estate in the country.
Like my father, I am not an egotistical man or a proud one. I do this because of duty. But there was a moment when I contented myself with a smile.
I had just signed a contract to purchase a centre in Australia for A$30 million. I signed a cheque for a A$3M deposit and gave it to the Vendor鈥檚 lawyer. A youngish fellow, he decided to phone my banker and ask whether I had sufficient funds in my account to clear the cheque. The banker asked what the total sale price was. The lawyer answered, and my banker laughed. 鈥淭here are enough funds in this account to pay the entire sale price in cash.鈥�
The lawyer turned to me, squeamishly, and declared that we had a deal. I said, 鈥淚 was under the impression we had a deal before you phoned my bank.鈥�
I enquired after that lawyer once. It turned out he had married one of my property managers and was now running a coffee shop, ironically in one of my centres.
I have two daughters. They run our portfolio, and they do a more professional job of it than either I or my father ever did.
Perhaps, my father was better at taking risks than they are, but to be honest they are pretty good at it. I am proud of them, and he would be too. They have married well, and have given me four beautiful grandchildren.
As I said, I have carried our photo in my wallet for many years, ever since I learned of its existence.
Any other man in my position would possibly say that they had everything that they had ever desired.
For me, that is true, except in one sense that I have tried to overlook for fifty years.
I once desired you, that skinny white French girl in the fedora. I desired you with an intensity that I cannot find words to describe.
I have tried to rationalise and deny that desire. I鈥檝e tried to convince myself that I only ever desired you once. And that is actually the truth. I did only desire you once, but that one occasion has lasted fifty years.
Now that I am about to die, or think I am, and my family will soon gather around me to say their farewells, I must take a match to this photo and set it alight, like you once set me alight, and perhaps, I will never know, perhaps I also set you alight, if not for as long.
My favourite nurse just brought me an ashtray and a cigarette lighter.
It took me two or three attempts to burn this image. It didn鈥檛 seem to want to go.
But now it is finished and there are only ashes in the tray, and my failing memory, and when I die and it too goes, there will be nothing left of our desire.
Mural at the Pawpaw Cafe attached to the Brisbane Restaurant "Green Papaya"
December 12, 2009
L'Amant looks simple on the surface. Marguerite Duras, about 70 when she wrote it, tells you about her first affair, with a rich Chinese man. She was a fifteen year old girl in colonial-era Vietnam, he was a dozen years older. Her family was desperately poor. Her mentally ill mother tacitly condoned the relationship; Marguerite's lover was generous, and they needed the money. Then she screamed at her daughter and beat her. The language is plain, unadorned and impersonal, stripped to its bare essentials. Sometimes I almost felt I was reading a math text. The author is not trying to tell you a love story or complain about how fate, her lover or her family mistreated her. She just wants to write down what happened and make peace with it. The result is a beautiful and deeply affecting book.
I wish I could write something like this. I thought back to things that had happened to me when I was a teenager and I tried to write about them the way Duras did, and I couldn't do it. I can't detach enough. I can't be sufficiently objective. I can't stop myself from judging or interpreting.
Here's a fragment, one piece I can see clearly. I hadn't seen my lover for some weeks; she had been sent overseas by her parents. Maybe it was because they disapproved of our relationship. I went to visit her. She came to meet me at the station. We went to a cheap hotel. We took our clothes off and got into bed. I held her, and she told me she had been unfaithful. There was a boy who was so stricken with her; she'd been unable to refuse him. I said it didn't matter. Then she said that there was a second man, older, a martial arts instructor. She was sleeping with him regularly. She said it was different from other relationships she'd had; the sex was different. I asked how. Sometimes, she said, he just entered her, no foreplay, nothing, and that was somehow special. I said it was good to hold her. I could feel her body telling me that she still loved me. She said that she wasn't telling me anything. We pulled apart and got dressed, and we never slept together again.
Some day, I might be able to tell the whole story and explain how it wasn't her fault, or mine. It just came out that way.
I wish I could write something like this. I thought back to things that had happened to me when I was a teenager and I tried to write about them the way Duras did, and I couldn't do it. I can't detach enough. I can't be sufficiently objective. I can't stop myself from judging or interpreting.
Here's a fragment, one piece I can see clearly. I hadn't seen my lover for some weeks; she had been sent overseas by her parents. Maybe it was because they disapproved of our relationship. I went to visit her. She came to meet me at the station. We went to a cheap hotel. We took our clothes off and got into bed. I held her, and she told me she had been unfaithful. There was a boy who was so stricken with her; she'd been unable to refuse him. I said it didn't matter. Then she said that there was a second man, older, a martial arts instructor. She was sleeping with him regularly. She said it was different from other relationships she'd had; the sex was different. I asked how. Sometimes, she said, he just entered her, no foreplay, nothing, and that was somehow special. I said it was good to hold her. I could feel her body telling me that she still loved me. She said that she wasn't telling me anything. We pulled apart and got dressed, and we never slept together again.
Some day, I might be able to tell the whole story and explain how it wasn't her fault, or mine. It just came out that way.
November 6, 2012
This is what they mean when they say, "lush prose."
July 1, 2011
Dearest Marguerite,
I know it is awfully late now, to write to you. I could not resist though. I thought about you the other day; as her eyes scanned the Chinese gentleman for the first time, on the ferry to Mekong. The demure young features veiled under a mannish hat, gave away precocious impression of a 15 year old girl as he offered her a cigarette. The statuesque Chinaman who exuded charm and eloquence was besotted by her as she was by him. He was to be her lover; an escape from the abhorrent and impoverished life. On the brink of her sexual exploration, she yearned for the pleasure of his touch, his embrace; a world that was beyond the imagination of a young school girl. As she pressed her red-stained lips on the cold glass of his car, he knew he could never marry her, a fact that he told her several times, but would always love her, for 鈥淎 love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime鈥ever.鈥�
As the movie played on my screen, I searched for your book and there it lay among the dusty pile of old books, a slight tattered at the cover page. An affair of a pubescent girl with a 27-year old affluent Chinese man brings variation in one鈥檚 perception. Over the years, the book was disparaged for its pedophilic nature and the overtly sexual display of a young girl romanticizing to the term 'prostitutes'. The girl鈥檚 impecunious and abusive family history, they said was a convenient backdrop to pen a fragile child pornographic literary piece. From the time I read the book as an 12 year old, when I accidentally 鈥渂orrowed鈥� the book from my cousin鈥檚 library stock to those several occasions, I comprehended the writings as an adult, all I observed was a power struggle of an adolescent who naively used her sexuality to find a sense of belonging and in some way gain control over her existence. The story is far more complicated than just the exterior of a love affair. It delineates a distorted notion of true love (if the term is applicable here), the hypocrisy of social mores and the chaos derived from infidelity and wealth.
I have cherished the book for decades now, and words fail me in expressing my heartwarming thankfulness for bursting my initial deluded bubble of an idyllic Nancy Drew utopia, exposing the discrepancies of a flawed society and sullied emotions. Life unexpectedly became a rational place to live in.
R.I. P. 鈥� Ms. Duras.
From,
The 7th grader, who once scribbled 鈥榦rgasm鈥� for the very first time in her history textbook and became wiser.
I know it is awfully late now, to write to you. I could not resist though. I thought about you the other day; as her eyes scanned the Chinese gentleman for the first time, on the ferry to Mekong. The demure young features veiled under a mannish hat, gave away precocious impression of a 15 year old girl as he offered her a cigarette. The statuesque Chinaman who exuded charm and eloquence was besotted by her as she was by him. He was to be her lover; an escape from the abhorrent and impoverished life. On the brink of her sexual exploration, she yearned for the pleasure of his touch, his embrace; a world that was beyond the imagination of a young school girl. As she pressed her red-stained lips on the cold glass of his car, he knew he could never marry her, a fact that he told her several times, but would always love her, for 鈥淎 love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime鈥ever.鈥�
As the movie played on my screen, I searched for your book and there it lay among the dusty pile of old books, a slight tattered at the cover page. An affair of a pubescent girl with a 27-year old affluent Chinese man brings variation in one鈥檚 perception. Over the years, the book was disparaged for its pedophilic nature and the overtly sexual display of a young girl romanticizing to the term 'prostitutes'. The girl鈥檚 impecunious and abusive family history, they said was a convenient backdrop to pen a fragile child pornographic literary piece. From the time I read the book as an 12 year old, when I accidentally 鈥渂orrowed鈥� the book from my cousin鈥檚 library stock to those several occasions, I comprehended the writings as an adult, all I observed was a power struggle of an adolescent who naively used her sexuality to find a sense of belonging and in some way gain control over her existence. The story is far more complicated than just the exterior of a love affair. It delineates a distorted notion of true love (if the term is applicable here), the hypocrisy of social mores and the chaos derived from infidelity and wealth.
I have cherished the book for decades now, and words fail me in expressing my heartwarming thankfulness for bursting my initial deluded bubble of an idyllic Nancy Drew utopia, exposing the discrepancies of a flawed society and sullied emotions. Life unexpectedly became a rational place to live in.
R.I. P. 鈥� Ms. Duras.
From,
The 7th grader, who once scribbled 鈥榦rgasm鈥� for the very first time in her history textbook and became wiser.
February 14, 2018
Prix Goncourt : 1984 . Who read novels like兀 : Les Mis茅rables, Camille : The Lady of the Camellias, The Outsider and The Little Prince.
丕賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱爻丕亘賯丞 賵睾賷乇賴丕 賲賳 賯丕卅賲丞 丕賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞 丕賱毓馗賷賲丞 鈥� 丕賱鬲賷 兀丨亘亘鬲賴丕 卮禺氐賷賸丕 鈥� 兀賯賵賱 賱賴 丕賱賷賵賲 兀囟賲 賴匕賴 丕賱鬲丨賮丞 丕賱氐睾賷乇丞 賱賭"毓亘賯乇賷鬲賴 丕賱賮賳賷丞丕" 賱賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞 丕賱鬲賷 兀毓噩亘鬲賳賷 賮賷 賮鬲乇丕鬲 爻丕亘賯丞 賲賳 丨賷丕鬲賷 丕賱賯乇丕卅賷丞.
貙 賴賷 賳賵賮賷賱丕 賮賷 (126) 賵賯丿 賰鬲亘鬲 亘囟賲賷乇 賲鬲賰賱賲 賵丕賱賰孬賷乇 賲賳 丕賱賲賵賳賵賱賵噩 丕賱丿丕禺賱賷 賱賰賳 鬲賯賳賷丞 廿爻鬲丨囟丕乇 丕賱賮賱丕卮 亘丕賰 - 匕賰乇賷 丕賱賲丕囟賷 - 賵鬲賵馗賷賮賴 賮賷 丕賱丨丕囟乇 孬賲 賵亘胤乇賷賯丞 噩賳賵賳賷丞 鬲噩毓賱毓 禺亘乇賸丕 廿爻鬲亘丕賯賷賸丕 賱賱賲爻鬲賯亘賱 賰丕賳 毓賲賱賸丕 廿丨鬲乇丕賮賷賸丕. 兀賳 鬲禺乇噩 丿賵乇丕爻 賰賱 賲丕 噩毓亘鬲賴丕 - 爻賷乇鬲賴丕 贍 賮賷 賯丕賱亘 乇賵丕賷丞 毓賲賷賯丞 賵賯賵賷丞 乇睾賲 氐睾乇 丨噩賲賴丕. 賱丕 鬲毓丿賵 賰賵賳賴丕 賳賵賮賷賱丕 - 乇賵丕賷丞 賮賷 兀賵賱 丕賱兀賲乇 賵兀禺乇賴 - 鬲購毓乇賷 匕丕鬲賴丕 賵兀爻乇鬲賴丕 賵鬲賯爻賵 毓賱賶 賳賮爻賴丕 賵兀賲賴丕 賵兀禺賷賴丕 丕賱兀賰亘乇 亘賰賱 賴匕丕 丕賱賵噩毓. 兀賳 鬲賳賯賱 賰賱 兀丨丿丕孬 胤賮賵賱鬲賴丕 賵賲乇丕賴賯鬲賴丕 賵氐賵賱賸丌 賱賲乇丨賱丞 丕賱卮亘丕亘 賵丕賱賳囟丨 賱賲丕 亘毓丿 丕賱賰賴賵賱丞 賵賯丿 鬲噩丕賵夭鬲 爻賳 丕賱爻亘毓賷賳 鬲賳賯賱賴 亘鬲賯賳賷賴 乇賵丕卅賷丞 毓丕賱賷丞 鬲卮毓乇賰 兀賳 賰賱 禺亘乇丕鬲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘丞 兀匕丕亘鬲賴丕 賵賵囟毓鬲賴丕 賮賷 賯丕賱亘 乇賵丕卅賷 毓賲賷賯 賷鬲胤賱亘 賲賳賰 噩賴丿賸丕 賱丕亘兀爻 賲賳 丕賱鬲乇賰賷夭
亘廿卮丕乇丕鬲 胤賮賷賮丞 毓賳 (爻丕賷睾賵賳 : 丕賱賲爻鬲毓賲乇丞 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞) 賮賷 賮賷鬲賳丕賲 (賴賵 鬲卮賷 賲賳賴 : 丕賱賷賵賲) 賳賯賱鬲 丕賱毓賲賯 丕賱鬲丕乇賷禺賷 丕賱賮賷鬲賳丕賲賷 賵丕賱氐賷賳賷 賵丕賱賮乇賳爻賷 丨賵賱 賴匕賴 丕賱賲賳胤賯丞 賵鬲賱賰 丕賱賮鬲乇丞 丕賱鬲乇賷禺賷丞. 兀賯賵賱 賮賷 廿卮丕乇丕鬲 胤賮賷賮丞 賱賰賳賴丕 賯丕丿乇丞 毓賱賶 禺賱賯 賮噩賵丞 夭賲賳賷丞 鬲噩亘乇賰 毓賱賶 乇丿賲賴丕 亘兀賯乇亘 賲毓賱賵賲丞 丨鬲賶 鬲毓賷 胤亘賷睾丞 丕賱賲爻鬲賵胤賳賵賳 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷賵賳 賮賭賷 賲噩鬲賲毓丕鬲 丕賱賲爻鬲毓賲乇丞 賱賱爻賰賾丕賳 丕賱兀氐賱賷賷賳.
廿賳賴丕 賯氐丞 毓丕卮賯丞 賮乇賳爻賷丞 賲乇丕賴賯丞. 毓卮賯鬲 亘胤乇賷賯鬲賴丕 丕賱禺丕氐丞 賵賰鬲亘鬲 爻賷乇丞 毓丕卮賯 氐賷賳賷 賰丕賳 賰賱丕賴賲丕 賷毓賱賲 丨賯賷賯丞 賲卮丕毓乇 丕賱丌禺乇 賵賰賷賮 兀賳 丕賱亘丨孬 毓賳 丕賱賲鬲毓丞 賷鬲噩丕賵夭 丨丿賵丿 丕賱賲鬲毓丞 丨丿 丕賱乇睾亘丞 賮賷 丕賱賴乇亘 賲賳 卮賷亍 賲丕 賱丕 鬲亘丿賷賴 丕賱氐賵乇丞
赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌
乇丕亘胤 賱鬲睾乇賷丿丕鬲 丨賵賱 乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱毓丕卮賯 丨賷孬 丨爻丕亘賷
丕賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱爻丕亘賯丞 賵睾賷乇賴丕 賲賳 賯丕卅賲丞 丕賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞 丕賱毓馗賷賲丞 鈥� 丕賱鬲賷 兀丨亘亘鬲賴丕 卮禺氐賷賸丕 鈥� 兀賯賵賱 賱賴 丕賱賷賵賲 兀囟賲 賴匕賴 丕賱鬲丨賮丞 丕賱氐睾賷乇丞 賱賭"毓亘賯乇賷鬲賴 丕賱賮賳賷丞丕" 賱賱兀毓賲丕賱 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞 丕賱鬲賷 兀毓噩亘鬲賳賷 賮賷 賮鬲乇丕鬲 爻丕亘賯丞 賲賳 丨賷丕鬲賷 丕賱賯乇丕卅賷丞.
貙 賴賷 賳賵賮賷賱丕 賮賷 (126) 賵賯丿 賰鬲亘鬲 亘囟賲賷乇 賲鬲賰賱賲 賵丕賱賰孬賷乇 賲賳 丕賱賲賵賳賵賱賵噩 丕賱丿丕禺賱賷 賱賰賳 鬲賯賳賷丞 廿爻鬲丨囟丕乇 丕賱賮賱丕卮 亘丕賰 - 匕賰乇賷 丕賱賲丕囟賷 - 賵鬲賵馗賷賮賴 賮賷 丕賱丨丕囟乇 孬賲 賵亘胤乇賷賯丞 噩賳賵賳賷丞 鬲噩毓賱毓 禺亘乇賸丕 廿爻鬲亘丕賯賷賸丕 賱賱賲爻鬲賯亘賱 賰丕賳 毓賲賱賸丕 廿丨鬲乇丕賮賷賸丕. 兀賳 鬲禺乇噩 丿賵乇丕爻 賰賱 賲丕 噩毓亘鬲賴丕 - 爻賷乇鬲賴丕 贍 賮賷 賯丕賱亘 乇賵丕賷丞 毓賲賷賯丞 賵賯賵賷丞 乇睾賲 氐睾乇 丨噩賲賴丕. 賱丕 鬲毓丿賵 賰賵賳賴丕 賳賵賮賷賱丕 - 乇賵丕賷丞 賮賷 兀賵賱 丕賱兀賲乇 賵兀禺乇賴 - 鬲購毓乇賷 匕丕鬲賴丕 賵兀爻乇鬲賴丕 賵鬲賯爻賵 毓賱賶 賳賮爻賴丕 賵兀賲賴丕 賵兀禺賷賴丕 丕賱兀賰亘乇 亘賰賱 賴匕丕 丕賱賵噩毓. 兀賳 鬲賳賯賱 賰賱 兀丨丿丕孬 胤賮賵賱鬲賴丕 賵賲乇丕賴賯鬲賴丕 賵氐賵賱賸丌 賱賲乇丨賱丞 丕賱卮亘丕亘 賵丕賱賳囟丨 賱賲丕 亘毓丿 丕賱賰賴賵賱丞 賵賯丿 鬲噩丕賵夭鬲 爻賳 丕賱爻亘毓賷賳 鬲賳賯賱賴 亘鬲賯賳賷賴 乇賵丕卅賷丞 毓丕賱賷丞 鬲卮毓乇賰 兀賳 賰賱 禺亘乇丕鬲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘丞 兀匕丕亘鬲賴丕 賵賵囟毓鬲賴丕 賮賷 賯丕賱亘 乇賵丕卅賷 毓賲賷賯 賷鬲胤賱亘 賲賳賰 噩賴丿賸丕 賱丕亘兀爻 賲賳 丕賱鬲乇賰賷夭
亘廿卮丕乇丕鬲 胤賮賷賮丞 毓賳 (爻丕賷睾賵賳 : 丕賱賲爻鬲毓賲乇丞 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷丞) 賮賷 賮賷鬲賳丕賲 (賴賵 鬲卮賷 賲賳賴 : 丕賱賷賵賲) 賳賯賱鬲 丕賱毓賲賯 丕賱鬲丕乇賷禺賷 丕賱賮賷鬲賳丕賲賷 賵丕賱氐賷賳賷 賵丕賱賮乇賳爻賷 丨賵賱 賴匕賴 丕賱賲賳胤賯丞 賵鬲賱賰 丕賱賮鬲乇丞 丕賱鬲乇賷禺賷丞. 兀賯賵賱 賮賷 廿卮丕乇丕鬲 胤賮賷賮丞 賱賰賳賴丕 賯丕丿乇丞 毓賱賶 禺賱賯 賮噩賵丞 夭賲賳賷丞 鬲噩亘乇賰 毓賱賶 乇丿賲賴丕 亘兀賯乇亘 賲毓賱賵賲丞 丨鬲賶 鬲毓賷 胤亘賷睾丞 丕賱賲爻鬲賵胤賳賵賳 丕賱賮乇賳爻賷賵賳 賮賭賷 賲噩鬲賲毓丕鬲 丕賱賲爻鬲毓賲乇丞 賱賱爻賰賾丕賳 丕賱兀氐賱賷賷賳.
廿賳賴丕 賯氐丞 毓丕卮賯丞 賮乇賳爻賷丞 賲乇丕賴賯丞. 毓卮賯鬲 亘胤乇賷賯鬲賴丕 丕賱禺丕氐丞 賵賰鬲亘鬲 爻賷乇丞 毓丕卮賯 氐賷賳賷 賰丕賳 賰賱丕賴賲丕 賷毓賱賲 丨賯賷賯丞 賲卮丕毓乇 丕賱丌禺乇 賵賰賷賮 兀賳 丕賱亘丨孬 毓賳 丕賱賲鬲毓丞 賷鬲噩丕賵夭 丨丿賵丿 丕賱賲鬲毓丞 丨丿 丕賱乇睾亘丞 賮賷 丕賱賴乇亘 賲賳 卮賷亍 賲丕 賱丕 鬲亘丿賷賴 丕賱氐賵乇丞
赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌赌
乇丕亘胤 賱鬲睾乇賷丿丕鬲 丨賵賱 乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱毓丕卮賯 丨賷孬 丨爻丕亘賷
February 7, 2023
I just finished this book. Gorgeous prose, dark content, heartbreaking story. I wonder, how do I rate a book about a 15 and a half year old girl and a 27 year old man? The cringy part of me wants to give a one star, but then I thought about it鈥�
This is the story of Marguerite Duras, almost entirely autobiographical. This is her experience. As much as I felt uncomfortable, it's her story, her experience. It's not a fictional romanticized story of pedophile. It's a real and true experience.
The story is told in a complicating way, which made me wonder how the translation from French to English interfered. The young girl (only referred to as 'I' or 15 1/2) is at boarding school when a black shiny car, with a wealthy Chinese man arrives. She's dressed in gold heeled shoes, a fedora, and a dress, dark lipstick. She gets into the car with him and the rest is, not always in detail, an illicit relationship between the two.
This little girl has a childhood void of any emotion. Her abusive older brother is a tyrant, her mother a statue, and her younger brother (the only one she has affection for) too young to understand the ramifications of life.
In this affair, the girl takes money from the man, giving it to her family--who heedlessly devour it. She tells the man she will never love him, but the tides shift, the tenderness with which she's treated has an impenetrable affect on her. A fathers love, never known.
The relationship, doomed from the beginning--age, class, race all swirling above them. In truth, I feel like, while the relationship is wrong--they both seem to connect with suffering. The man, confined to race and wealth, not able to freely love, in a world that judges ever move. The girl, broken and damaged from a family void of emotion. Her older brother, is a monster. The way he hurts, hunts, and damages the family was more sickening than the affair.
While researching 'The Lover,' I learned that Duras wrote it when she was 70 years old. A look back into a time most have forgotten. For many, 15 feels like 14, and 14 feels like 15. The numbers blur together in our teens, but for Duras, it was the most memorable moment, possibly, her entire life.
This isn't a retelling of an illicit affair, its darker, much darker. It's the story of a young girl, coming of age, abandoned to her own devices, navigating a foreign world, without an ounce of support from her family. THAT, is a lot.
While many will find this novella uncomfortable, it is told from the perspective of one's experience. That, of course, doesn't make it right. Yet, Duras brings her story to light with words that shatter, break apart, and never really come together鈥攖here is no intention of a happy ending. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.
4/5 stars
This is the story of Marguerite Duras, almost entirely autobiographical. This is her experience. As much as I felt uncomfortable, it's her story, her experience. It's not a fictional romanticized story of pedophile. It's a real and true experience.
Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire.
The story is told in a complicating way, which made me wonder how the translation from French to English interfered. The young girl (only referred to as 'I' or 15 1/2) is at boarding school when a black shiny car, with a wealthy Chinese man arrives. She's dressed in gold heeled shoes, a fedora, and a dress, dark lipstick. She gets into the car with him and the rest is, not always in detail, an illicit relationship between the two.
This little girl has a childhood void of any emotion. Her abusive older brother is a tyrant, her mother a statue, and her younger brother (the only one she has affection for) too young to understand the ramifications of life.
In this affair, the girl takes money from the man, giving it to her family--who heedlessly devour it. She tells the man she will never love him, but the tides shift, the tenderness with which she's treated has an impenetrable affect on her. A fathers love, never known.
The relationship, doomed from the beginning--age, class, race all swirling above them. In truth, I feel like, while the relationship is wrong--they both seem to connect with suffering. The man, confined to race and wealth, not able to freely love, in a world that judges ever move. The girl, broken and damaged from a family void of emotion. Her older brother, is a monster. The way he hurts, hunts, and damages the family was more sickening than the affair.
While researching 'The Lover,' I learned that Duras wrote it when she was 70 years old. A look back into a time most have forgotten. For many, 15 feels like 14, and 14 feels like 15. The numbers blur together in our teens, but for Duras, it was the most memorable moment, possibly, her entire life.
The story of my life doesn鈥檛 exist. Does not exist. There鈥檚 never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it鈥檚 not true, there was no one.
This isn't a retelling of an illicit affair, its darker, much darker. It's the story of a young girl, coming of age, abandoned to her own devices, navigating a foreign world, without an ounce of support from her family. THAT, is a lot.
Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk...It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply its impenetrable... We don't' even look at each other.
While many will find this novella uncomfortable, it is told from the perspective of one's experience. That, of course, doesn't make it right. Yet, Duras brings her story to light with words that shatter, break apart, and never really come together鈥攖here is no intention of a happy ending. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.
4/5 stars
September 3, 2014
Something dark and deeply unsettling simmers angrily beneath the surface of this narrative. This 'something' becomes so potent a force, arousing fear and feelings of disgust in the reader, that one is often tempted to abandon reading and save oneself from all the unpleasantness Duras shoves right in the reader's face without inhibitions.
'The Lover' is a brutally honest attempt at reconciliation with the past, irrespective of how much hurt and damage it may have caused. It is a tale of Marguerite Duras' childhood years spent in what is modern day Vietnam and reads almost like a memoir or piece of non-fiction at times.
The narrator of The Lover is sometimes a young girl of 15, sometimes a woman, sometimes a mere child, sometimes an old lady living in France as an established novelist and sometimes a girl caught in a painful identity crisis. Duras' erratic narration and tendency to flip back and forth between the past and present and her personal contemplations (slightly in a Slaughterhouse-Fiveish way) ensure that the reader occasionally loses the thread connecting all the events. But even so the story resonates strongly with the one reading and and one can barely prevent a disturbing image of human suffering from being burned into their mind.
The unnamed narrator's voice is strangely full of apathy and indifference. It almost lacks a clear character. There are times when the resentment in this young girl reaches a fever pitch and thrashes about restlessly for an outlet into the realm of reality. But in the very next moment, it reduces in intensity and assumes its former state of equanimity. It is as if she is torn between feelings of revulsion and longing and cannot pick one over the other. Her existence itself seems precariously balanced on the predominant emotions of hatred and love that she feels for the people closest to her.
She begins a turbulent love affair with a much older, rich Chinese man and this, in turn, becomes both a boon and a bane for her. He becomes her safe haven from the cruelties of life and the emotional and physical abuse she silently suffers at the hands of her own family members. But then, he also becomes the cause of her social stigma and shame - thus he is her tormentor and her savior at the same time.
Initially it is hinted that the young girl is cold and indifferent towards her lover and possibly does not reciprocate his feelings. But at the end of the affair, she comes to the realization that her love for him may have been genuine after all.
A perpetual state of chaos seems to prevail inside the adolescent protagonist's head and this almost becomes an accurate reflection of the tumultuous times of a colonized, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Indo-China (present Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) - a war-ravaged land whose fortunes remained at the mercy of various colonial masters for decades.
Even though a doomed romance forms the main subject matter of this book, what often overshadows its acutely depressing tones, is the looming presence of Indo-China. Duras' love for this land shines through the haze of her traumatic years.
Because interspersed between the disturbing imagery, there are beautiful descriptions of Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indo-China, bustling with life and activity, the river Mekong and the morning ferry carrying its passengers across to Saigon, where the young girl goes to boarding school.
Thus it is heartening to see that Vietnam is not reduced to the status of a mere backdrop in a tale of personal miseries but comes alive in its state of silent agony, in Duras' sparse but beautiful prose. Its sights and sounds and smells and landscapes become an integral part of this semi autobiographical novella and add a distinct character to it.
The Lover does not make my list of all-time-favorites and nor may it merit a re-reading. But even then it rightly deserves the 4 stars I awarded it, simply because it succeeds in painting a moving picture of ambivalent relationships, that transcends the boundaries of race or ethnicity and appeals to the universal human spirit.
'The Lover' is a brutally honest attempt at reconciliation with the past, irrespective of how much hurt and damage it may have caused. It is a tale of Marguerite Duras' childhood years spent in what is modern day Vietnam and reads almost like a memoir or piece of non-fiction at times.
The narrator of The Lover is sometimes a young girl of 15, sometimes a woman, sometimes a mere child, sometimes an old lady living in France as an established novelist and sometimes a girl caught in a painful identity crisis. Duras' erratic narration and tendency to flip back and forth between the past and present and her personal contemplations (slightly in a Slaughterhouse-Fiveish way) ensure that the reader occasionally loses the thread connecting all the events. But even so the story resonates strongly with the one reading and and one can barely prevent a disturbing image of human suffering from being burned into their mind.
The unnamed narrator's voice is strangely full of apathy and indifference. It almost lacks a clear character. There are times when the resentment in this young girl reaches a fever pitch and thrashes about restlessly for an outlet into the realm of reality. But in the very next moment, it reduces in intensity and assumes its former state of equanimity. It is as if she is torn between feelings of revulsion and longing and cannot pick one over the other. Her existence itself seems precariously balanced on the predominant emotions of hatred and love that she feels for the people closest to her.
She begins a turbulent love affair with a much older, rich Chinese man and this, in turn, becomes both a boon and a bane for her. He becomes her safe haven from the cruelties of life and the emotional and physical abuse she silently suffers at the hands of her own family members. But then, he also becomes the cause of her social stigma and shame - thus he is her tormentor and her savior at the same time.
I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.
Initially it is hinted that the young girl is cold and indifferent towards her lover and possibly does not reciprocate his feelings. But at the end of the affair, she comes to the realization that her love for him may have been genuine after all.
A perpetual state of chaos seems to prevail inside the adolescent protagonist's head and this almost becomes an accurate reflection of the tumultuous times of a colonized, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Indo-China (present Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) - a war-ravaged land whose fortunes remained at the mercy of various colonial masters for decades.
Even though a doomed romance forms the main subject matter of this book, what often overshadows its acutely depressing tones, is the looming presence of Indo-China. Duras' love for this land shines through the haze of her traumatic years.
Because interspersed between the disturbing imagery, there are beautiful descriptions of Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indo-China, bustling with life and activity, the river Mekong and the morning ferry carrying its passengers across to Saigon, where the young girl goes to boarding school.
Thus it is heartening to see that Vietnam is not reduced to the status of a mere backdrop in a tale of personal miseries but comes alive in its state of silent agony, in Duras' sparse but beautiful prose. Its sights and sounds and smells and landscapes become an integral part of this semi autobiographical novella and add a distinct character to it.
"The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There's nothing solid separating us from other people. They don't know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim.
Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it's sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest."
The Lover does not make my list of all-time-favorites and nor may it merit a re-reading. But even then it rightly deserves the 4 stars I awarded it, simply because it succeeds in painting a moving picture of ambivalent relationships, that transcends the boundaries of race or ethnicity and appeals to the universal human spirit.
January 26, 2021
It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me.
Gorgeously disturbed and disturbing, fragrant with melancholy and a kind of sepia-tinted nostalgia for lost innocence, youth, love. But while the ostensible eponymous lover is the wealthy Chinese man with whom the barely adult (she's fifteen) narrator has a subversive affair, I can't help feeling that this is more widely concerned with love of a place, a time, a family and - especially - a mother who simultaneously enrages and yet leaves the narrator wanting to know and possess her: 'she makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvellous dream of putting her to death with your own hands'.
Evocations of sex, desire and death collide and repeat themselves and we return obsessively to key moments: the girl on the boat in her silk dress, man's hat and gold lam茅 shoes, the expensive black limousine, photographs that encode a lost time and people no longer living.
Duras' prose is hallucinogenic, mesmerising and, like other female writers ( comes immediately to mind, also ), she is expert at writing through what isn't said - life and meaning exists in the gaps of the unspoken. The narrator also slips seamlessly between past and present, between 'I' and 'she' as she turns her older, writer's gaze on the girl she once was, making herself both subject and author of the text - a text which balances tentatively somewhere on the spectrum between fiction and notorious biography.
With a light touch, Duras sketches in what it means to grow up female, poor, but a member of a white coloniser race in what was French Indo-China (now Vietnam), and gestures towards all kinds of transgressions related to gender, race, age, even what is and isn't allowed within conventional family feelings.
At only around 120 pages, this is extraordinarily resonant, both beautiful but also troubling for many reasons. What an oversight that so little of Duras' writing has been translated and is in print.
September 15, 2022
Despite its title, The Lover is not a love story. Like Nabokov's Lolita, older men take advantage of underage girls, pretending as though these "sexual arrangements" (i.e. rape in Lolita and statutory rape in The Lover) are born out of pure affection and mutual respect.
But whereas Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's confessional protagonist, who tries to win over his audience from his jail cell, painting himself as the image of a "hopeless romantic" with an incurable illness, Marguerite Duras chooses to tell the narrative from the point of view of the young protagonist, a 15-year-old girl with a dysfunctional family and lower-class background.
In Lolita, the voice of Dolores Haze is effectively strangled by Humbert's narration. We don't get to hear her side of the story. We don't even get to know her as a real person. Lolita is the name that Humbert bestows upon her, it is a manifestation of Humbert's fantasy in which Dolores becomes the sole object of his desire, she is no longer a subject. Dolores becomes Lolita, the "nymph", whose sole purpose it is to satisfy Humbert's twisted fantasy of her. Who this 12-year-old girl really is? The readers will never know.
And whilst Duras refuses to giver her 15-year-old protagonist a name, we nonetheless get her side of the story, and only hers. We learn of her dysfunctional family, of her 27-year-old "lover", the son of prominent Chinese businessman. The "lover" mimics Humbert鈥檚 obsessive attachment to his nameless paramour. However, Duras strips their relationship of any romantic pretense, a means that is achieved by having the narrative be told in retrospect, the language the older protagonist uses when looking back on her youth is stripped from false romance and is often tainted with regret.
It is out of this complicated and harrowing family situation that the girl seeks and stays in the unconventional relationship to her rich and older "lover". Out of financial necessity and fear, she seeks stability through him. But when her "lover" takes her family out to dinner at fancy restaurants, it's nothing more but a painful and shame-inducing transaction. Her family will barely speak, let alone look at her lover, resenting the fact that they have to depend on a Chinese man for food, but not proud enough to refuse. The narrator reflects: "When it concerns my lover I鈥檓 powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expressions of someone who stares into space."
Critics have often labeled The Lover as an erotic novel, but to me, the erotic or romantic "relationship" serves only as the backdrop to a larger, overarching theme: the loss of childhood for the disillusion of rushed adulthood. The girl is constantly on the defense with her unpredictable mother, who has no faith in her. The girl confesses to her lover, "Today I tell him it's a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life." Dolores and Charlotte, the bickering mother and daughter in Lolita, share a similarly broken relationship. However, Nabokov denies Dolores the chance to ever grow up. Dolores death in childbirth at age seventeen, always defined by the possession of a man.
Duras discards the male gaze in her narrative. Her unnamed protagonist gets to grow up. She is not victimized or infantilized. It's no surprise that the girl hopes to be a writer when she grows up. o write is to make sense of the world, to carve a place for oneself, to affirm the importance and relevance of one's existence. Unlike Dolores Haze, this nameless girl gets the opportunity to fight for autonomy. There's still an obvious power imbalance between the girl and her lover, but she is less a tricked hostage, whisked away for an endless road trip that would be every girl's worst nightmare. Romantic love is not the end goal, even though the girl seeks relief from her isolation and loneliness in her "relationship", her end goal is emancipation through the pursuit of physical connection.
In the introduction of the English translation, Maxine Hong Kingston writes: "The girl and her mother and brothers are barbarians, sans culture. How to enroot oneself but to make primitive, sexual connection with another?" Tired of being rootless, the girl finds a temporary home in a stranger who is just as lost, barely afloat.
Even though the events Duras describes revolve around highly sensitive topics (such as emotional and physical abuse, racism in the French colonies, and issues of consent in relationships involving teenagers and adults), she is not afraid to be honest with her readers. There is no romanticizing of her colonial childhood nor of the trauma that she carried until her death. Nonetheless, The Lover is highly poetic and Duras a lyrical writer. Through her words, she manages to transport her readers to a world that no longer exists, a world of Indochinese landscapes and people she saw abound. If you let it, The Lover will take a hold of you, and it won't let go.
But whereas Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's confessional protagonist, who tries to win over his audience from his jail cell, painting himself as the image of a "hopeless romantic" with an incurable illness, Marguerite Duras chooses to tell the narrative from the point of view of the young protagonist, a 15-year-old girl with a dysfunctional family and lower-class background.
In Lolita, the voice of Dolores Haze is effectively strangled by Humbert's narration. We don't get to hear her side of the story. We don't even get to know her as a real person. Lolita is the name that Humbert bestows upon her, it is a manifestation of Humbert's fantasy in which Dolores becomes the sole object of his desire, she is no longer a subject. Dolores becomes Lolita, the "nymph", whose sole purpose it is to satisfy Humbert's twisted fantasy of her. Who this 12-year-old girl really is? The readers will never know.
And whilst Duras refuses to giver her 15-year-old protagonist a name, we nonetheless get her side of the story, and only hers. We learn of her dysfunctional family, of her 27-year-old "lover", the son of prominent Chinese businessman. The "lover" mimics Humbert鈥檚 obsessive attachment to his nameless paramour. However, Duras strips their relationship of any romantic pretense, a means that is achieved by having the narrative be told in retrospect, the language the older protagonist uses when looking back on her youth is stripped from false romance and is often tainted with regret.
The story of my life doesn鈥檛 exist. Does not exist. There鈥檚 never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it鈥檚 not true, there was no one.Throughout the narrative, which refuses to acknowledge traditional chronology and instead goes back and forth between the protagonist's present as a famous French writer and her childhood and youth in French Indochina, we catch glimpses at the young girl's harsh realities. The sudden death of her father impacted her family not only emotionally but financially, as they had to survive without him in Indochina. Consequently, the girl's mother 鈥� "she was desperate with despair" 鈥� owes numerous debts and often loses herself in the blackout despair of her manic depression. The girl also lives in constant fear of her brothers. Her older brother is violent, aggressive, selfish and vagrant and terrorises the whole family; her younger brother is his prime victim, a fact that distresses the girl greatly: "I tell him my elder brother's cold, insulting violence is there whatever happens to us,听whatever comes our way. His first impulse is always to kill, to wipe out, to hold sway over life, to scorn, to hunt, to make suffer."
It is out of this complicated and harrowing family situation that the girl seeks and stays in the unconventional relationship to her rich and older "lover". Out of financial necessity and fear, she seeks stability through him. But when her "lover" takes her family out to dinner at fancy restaurants, it's nothing more but a painful and shame-inducing transaction. Her family will barely speak, let alone look at her lover, resenting the fact that they have to depend on a Chinese man for food, but not proud enough to refuse. The narrator reflects: "When it concerns my lover I鈥檓 powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expressions of someone who stares into space."
Critics have often labeled The Lover as an erotic novel, but to me, the erotic or romantic "relationship" serves only as the backdrop to a larger, overarching theme: the loss of childhood for the disillusion of rushed adulthood. The girl is constantly on the defense with her unpredictable mother, who has no faith in her. The girl confesses to her lover, "Today I tell him it's a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life." Dolores and Charlotte, the bickering mother and daughter in Lolita, share a similarly broken relationship. However, Nabokov denies Dolores the chance to ever grow up. Dolores death in childbirth at age seventeen, always defined by the possession of a man.
Duras discards the male gaze in her narrative. Her unnamed protagonist gets to grow up. She is not victimized or infantilized. It's no surprise that the girl hopes to be a writer when she grows up. o write is to make sense of the world, to carve a place for oneself, to affirm the importance and relevance of one's existence. Unlike Dolores Haze, this nameless girl gets the opportunity to fight for autonomy. There's still an obvious power imbalance between the girl and her lover, but she is less a tricked hostage, whisked away for an endless road trip that would be every girl's worst nightmare. Romantic love is not the end goal, even though the girl seeks relief from her isolation and loneliness in her "relationship", her end goal is emancipation through the pursuit of physical connection.
In the introduction of the English translation, Maxine Hong Kingston writes: "The girl and her mother and brothers are barbarians, sans culture. How to enroot oneself but to make primitive, sexual connection with another?" Tired of being rootless, the girl finds a temporary home in a stranger who is just as lost, barely afloat.
Even though the events Duras describes revolve around highly sensitive topics (such as emotional and physical abuse, racism in the French colonies, and issues of consent in relationships involving teenagers and adults), she is not afraid to be honest with her readers. There is no romanticizing of her colonial childhood nor of the trauma that she carried until her death. Nonetheless, The Lover is highly poetic and Duras a lyrical writer. Through her words, she manages to transport her readers to a world that no longer exists, a world of Indochinese landscapes and people she saw abound. If you let it, The Lover will take a hold of you, and it won't let go.
August 27, 2021
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The Lover strikes me as little more than an exercise in literary masturbation. This novella is overwrought, self-indulgent, and ultimately insubstantial.
Fooled by the promise of its first pages, I soon found myself irked by the narrator's linguistic burps. With the exception of two or three characters, everyone else is nameless. Alienation is de rigueur.
The narrator revisits her past, engaging herself in a sort of mental seesaw, where she jumps from thought to thought, from image to image. Her fragmented and remote narrative failed to arouse my interest, if anything it merely struck me as disingenuous, a feeble attempt self-fashioning.
One moment she's old in France, the next line she's going on about how she looked as a fifteen-year girl, on the cusps of a sexual awakening, predictably burdened by the 'unstable' mother, the mean older brothers and the slightly-less-nasty younger brother. They are poor and unhappy. The narrator wears a man's hat (how riveting). She has sex with an older Chinese man. He loves her, or at least he thinks he does. They have some more sex, he treats her like a doll (putting makeup on her), our protagonist goes with it. Why? I don't know. He's portrayed as 'weak' and a 'coward'...great representation (not).
This cast of unnamed characters wallow in their misery. Here and there the story is swept away by a stream of consciousness. Duras tries to be sensual鈥斺€淭he balance between her figure and the way the body bears the breasts, outside itself, as if they were separate. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands, this outwardness held out toward them.鈥濃€攂ut her purple prose veers into the ridiculous.
There were also these childish attempts at introspection:
鈥淪uddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it.鈥�
Which seemed a mere echo of Arthur Rimbaud's 鈥淛e est un autre鈥� (I is another).
The gists of my review is this: I disliked The Lover. A lot. And to compare this to Lolita is an insult to Nabokov.
The Lover strikes me as little more than an exercise in literary masturbation. This novella is overwrought, self-indulgent, and ultimately insubstantial.
Fooled by the promise of its first pages, I soon found myself irked by the narrator's linguistic burps. With the exception of two or three characters, everyone else is nameless. Alienation is de rigueur.
The narrator revisits her past, engaging herself in a sort of mental seesaw, where she jumps from thought to thought, from image to image. Her fragmented and remote narrative failed to arouse my interest, if anything it merely struck me as disingenuous, a feeble attempt self-fashioning.
One moment she's old in France, the next line she's going on about how she looked as a fifteen-year girl, on the cusps of a sexual awakening, predictably burdened by the 'unstable' mother, the mean older brothers and the slightly-less-nasty younger brother. They are poor and unhappy. The narrator wears a man's hat (how riveting). She has sex with an older Chinese man. He loves her, or at least he thinks he does. They have some more sex, he treats her like a doll (putting makeup on her), our protagonist goes with it. Why? I don't know. He's portrayed as 'weak' and a 'coward'...great representation (not).
This cast of unnamed characters wallow in their misery. Here and there the story is swept away by a stream of consciousness. Duras tries to be sensual鈥斺€淭he balance between her figure and the way the body bears the breasts, outside itself, as if they were separate. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands, this outwardness held out toward them.鈥濃€攂ut her purple prose veers into the ridiculous.
There were also these childish attempts at introspection:
鈥淪uddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it.鈥�
Which seemed a mere echo of Arthur Rimbaud's 鈥淛e est un autre鈥� (I is another).
The gists of my review is this: I disliked The Lover. A lot. And to compare this to Lolita is an insult to Nabokov.
October 23, 2019
螕伪位位喂魏萎 螜谓未慰魏委谓伪 蟿畏蟼 未蔚魏伪蔚蟿委伪蟼 蟿慰蠀 1930, 渭蔚 蠁蠈谓蟿慰 蟿畏谓 渭谓畏渭蔚喂蠋未畏
伪蠀蟿蠈蟺蔚蟻喂蠁蟻蠈谓畏蟽畏 蟿慰蠀 畏未慰谓喂魏慰蠉 苇蟻蠅蟿伪,
蟿畏 渭维蟽魏伪 蔚蟺伪谓伪蟽蟿伪蟿喂魏萎蟼 未蟻维蟽畏蟼 蔚谓维谓蟿喂伪 蟽蟿畏谓 蟺蟻慰魏伪蟿维位畏蠄畏 纬喂伪 蟿畏谓 苇纬蠂蟻蠅渭畏 伪纬维蟺畏,
蟿畏谓 慰喂魏蔚委伪 伪蠁畏纬畏渭伪蟿喂魏萎 蠁蠉蟽畏 蟿畏蟼 蟺蟻蠅蟿伪纬蠅谓委蟽蟿蟻喂伪蟼, 伪蠀蟿萎, 蟺慰蠀 蠂伪蟻伪魏蟿畏蟻委味蔚蟿伪喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蟻慰魏位畏蟿喂魏萎
魏伪喂 维谓蔚蟿畏 蟺蔚蟻畏蠁维谓蔚喂伪 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿维谓蟿喂伪蟼 蟿畏蟼
魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪蟺蔚谓慰蠂慰蟺慰喂畏渭苇谓畏 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭伪蟿喂魏萎 谓慰畏渭慰蟽蠉谓畏 蟿蠅谓 畏蟻蠋蠅谓.
螌位伪 蟺蟻慰纬蟻伪渭渭伪蟿喂蟽渭苇谓伪 渭蔚 苇谓伪谓 蟽魏伪谓未伪位蠋未畏, 蠂蔚喂蟻喂蟽蟿喂魏蠈 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 蟺蟻慰蟼 蟿慰谓 伪谓伪纬谓蠋蟽蟿畏,
蟽蔚 伪蠀蟿蠈谓, 蟺慰蠀 畏 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻谓蔚喂
谓伪 蟿慰谓 蟺蔚蟻维蟽蔚喂 伪渭苇蟽蠅蟼 蟽蟿慰蠀蟼 尾伪胃蠉蟿蔚蟻慰蠀蟼 渭慰谓慰位蠈纬慰蠀蟼.
螒蠀蟿慰蠉蟼,蟺慰蠀 蟿伪 尾蟻维未喂伪 蟺蟻慰蟽蟺伪胃慰蠉谓 谓伪 蟽魏慰蟿蠋蟽慰蠀谓
蟿喂蟼 伪喂蟽胃萎蟽蔚喂蟼 苇谓蟿伪蟽畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟺伪蟻苇魏魏位喂蟽畏蟼,
伪蟺慰 蟿伪 渭蠀蟽蟿喂魏维 蟺慰蠀 魏蟻伪蟿维蔚喂 畏 蠄蠀蠂萎 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 魏伪蟻未喂维,
蔚谓蠋 畏 味蠅萎 蟿畏蟼 谓蠉蠂蟿伪蟼 蟿蠅谓 未喂伪位蠈纬蠅谓,
伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蔚 位伪蠂伪谓喂伪蟽渭苇谓蔚蟼 伪谓伪蟺谓慰苇蟼 魏伪喂 位蠀纬渭慰蠉蟼 蟺维胃慰蠀蟼,
蠂蟿蠀蟺维蔚喂 渭蔚 苇谓伪 胃蠀蟽喂伪蟽渭苇谓慰 胃蟻维蟽慰蟼 蟿喂蟼 蟺蠈蟻蟿蔚蟼 蟿畏蟼 蟽蠀谓蔚委未畏蟽畏蟼 魏伪喂 味畏蟿维蔚喂,
蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂伪 蟽蠁维位渭伪蟿伪,
纬喂伪 谓伪 渭畏谓 蟺蔚胃维谓蔚喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蔚委谓伪 蟿蠅谓 畏胃蠋谓 魏伪喂 蟿蠅谓 蟺伪蟻伪未蠈蟽蔚蠅谓.
螝维蟿喂 蟿苇蟿慰喂蔚蟼 苇谓谓慰喂蔚蟼 蟺蠅位慰蠉谓蟿伪喂 蟺伪谓维魏蟻喂尾伪
蟽蟿伪 蟺伪味维蟻喂伪 蟿蠅谓 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓蠅谓 伪蟺慰喂魏喂慰魏蟻伪蟿喂蠋谓 魏伪喂 蠈蟺慰喂慰蟼 未蔚谓 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻蔚喂 谓伪 蠂伪蟻委蟽蔚喂
魏伪喂 谓伪 未蔚蠂蟿蔚委 魏蟻伪蠀纬苇蟼 伪谓蔚委蟺蠅蟿畏蟼 蔚蠀未伪喂渭慰谓委伪蟼,
味蠅谓蟿伪谓苇蟼 魏伪喂 维纬蟻喂蔚蟼 ,
蟺蔚胃伪委谓蔚喂 伪蟺慰 蟽蟺伪蟽渭苇谓畏 魏伪蟻未喂维
蟽蟿慰 伪蟺伪蟻蟿蠂维喂谓蟿 蟿蠅谓 伪蟻胃蟻蠅蟿蠋谓 蠀蟺慰尾喂尾伪蟽渭蠋谓 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪蠈蟻喂蟽蟿畏 苇魏位蔚喂蠄畏 蟿慰蠀 芦蔚蟻伪蟽蟿萎禄蟺慰蠀 蟺维谓蟿伪 胃伪 魏伪蟿伪未喂魏维味蔚蟿伪喂.
螤维谓蟿伪 胃伪 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 谓伪 伪纬伪蟺萎蟽蔚喂 蟺苇蟻伪 伪蟺慰 蟿慰谓 蠁蠈尾慰, 蟺苇蟻伪 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 魏蠀蟻喂伪蟻蠂委伪 蟿畏蟼 伪蟻谓畏蟿喂魏蠈蟿畏蟿伪蟼
魏伪喂 未蔚谓 胃伪 蠁慰尾维蟿伪喂 谓伪 蟺蔚胃维谓蔚喂,
伪蠁慰蠉 魏伪喂 蠅蟼 味蠅谓蟿伪谓蠈蟼 尾委蠅谓蔚 蟿畏谓 魏伪胃畏渭蔚蟻喂谓蠈蟿畏蟿伪
蟿慰蠀 魏蔚谓慰蠉, 蟿慰蠀 维未蔚喂慰蠀 蟺蠀蟻萎谓伪 蟿畏蟼 蠄蠀蠂萎蟼
蟺慰蠀 苇蠂蔚喂 萎未畏 蟺蔚蟿维尉蔚喂 渭伪魏蟻喂维, 未喂蠈蟿喂 未蔚谓 维谓蟿蔚尉蔚 蟿慰 蠂维慰蟼 蟿畏蟼 蔚蟺喂尾慰位萎蟼 蟿蠅谓 慰喂魏慰纬蔚谓蔚喂伪魏蠋谓 蟽蠂蔚未委蠅谓 纬喂伪 蟿伪 蔚纬魏位萎渭伪蟿伪 蟺慰蠀 魏伪胃蠈蟻喂味伪谓 维蟺蔚喂蟻蔚蟼 伪谓蔚蟻伪蟽蟿蔚蟼 纬蔚谓喂苇蟼.
螤蠈蟽慰 蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂慰, 尾伪胃喂维 蟽喂蠅蟺畏蟻蠈 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蟿慰 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭伪蟿喂魏蠈 伪谓蟿委位伪位慰 魏伪喂 蟺慰位蠀蟺位慰魏蠈蟿伪蟿慰 蟽蟿蠀位 纬蟻伪蠁萎蟼.
纬喂伪 渭喂伪 未喂蟿蟿萎 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪 蟺维胃慰蠀蟼 魏伪喂 渭喂伪 蟺伪蟻维未慰尉畏 伪渭畏蠂伪谓委伪 蠁喂位慰蟽慰蠁委伪蟼 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蟿慰 伪魏伪蟿苇蟻纬伪蟽蟿慰 渭委蟽慰蟼,
蟿畏 味蠅萎 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 胃维谓伪蟿慰.
螘委谓伪喂 苇谓伪 蔚蟻蠅蟿喂魏蠈 伪蟻喂蟽蟿慰蠉蟻纬畏渭伪 未喂伪蟺慰位喂蟿喂蟽渭喂魏慰蠉 蟻慰渭伪谓蟿喂蟽渭慰蠉 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 纬魏蟻委味蔚蟼 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委蔚蟼
魏伪喂 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蔚 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂蔚蟼 蟺苇蟿蟻喂谓蔚蟼, 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓蔚蟼, 蟽喂蠅蟺畏位苇蟼 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 渭伪谓委伪 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿维胃位喂蠄畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿畏 伪谓维纬魏畏 蟿慰蠀 蔚蟽蠅蟿蔚蟻喂魏慰蠉 渭慰谓慰位蠈纬慰蠀,
伪蠀蟿慰蠉, 蟺慰蠀 渭伪蟼 伪蟺慰魏伪位蠉蟺蟿蔚喂 蟺蠅蟼 畏 蟽喂蠅蟺萎 蠂蟻畏蟽喂渭慰蟺慰喂蔚委蟿伪喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪
蟿畏蟼 畏蟻蠅委未伪蟼-伪蠁畏纬萎蟿蟻喂伪蟼 蠅蟼 蠈蟺位慰 纬喂伪 谓伪 蟽魏慰蟿蠋蟽蔚喂 慰 苇谓伪蟼 蟿慰谓 维位位慰谓.
螔伪胃喂维 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿畏 畏 未蠉谓伪渭畏 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿伪蠂蟻畏蟽蟿喂魏萎蟼 蟽蠀纬纬苇谓蔚喂伪蟼, 未苇蠂蔚蟿伪喂 魏伪喂 伪蠁慰蟻委味蔚喂 蟿畏谓 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠀渭苇谓畏 伪纬维蟺畏 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蟿畏谓 未喂魏萎 蟿慰蠀蟼
15蠂蟻慰谓畏 螕伪位位委未伪 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 谓蔚伪蟻蠈 螝喂谓苇味慰 蔚蟻伪蟽蟿萎,
纬蠈谓慰 蔚谓蠈蟼 蔚魏伪蟿慰渭渭蠀蟻喂慰蠉蠂慰蠀,
维胃蟻伪蠀蟽蟿慰蠀 魏伪喂 伪蟺伪蟻苇纬魏位喂蟿伪 蟽蠀渭渭慰蟻蠁蠅渭苇谓慰蠀 蟽蟿喂蟼 蠀蟺慰未蔚委尉蔚喂蟼 蟿畏蟼 蔚胃谓喂魏萎蟼 蟿慰蠀 蟺伪蟻维未慰蟽畏蟼.
螚 Duras 渭蔚 伪尉喂慰胃伪蠉渭伪蟽蟿畏 渭伪蔚蟽蟿蟻委伪 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻谓蔚喂 渭苇蟽伪 伪蟺慰 蟿伪 渭伪魏蟻喂谓维, 蟺苇蟿蟻喂谓伪, 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓伪 魏伪喂 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿伪 魏慰渭渭维蟿喂伪 蟿畏蟼 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪蟼 谓伪 蔚蠁伪蟻渭蠈蟽蔚喂 蟿畏谓 蟽喂蠅蟺萎 蠅蟼 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 苇魏蠁蟻伪蟽畏蟼 蟿慰蠀 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃萎渭伪蟿慰蟼.
韦畏谓 伪纬维蟺畏蟽伪. 螕喂 伪蠀蟿蠈 魏伪喂 渭蠈谓慰.
鉁ㄢ湪鉁ㄢ湪鉁ㄢ湪
螝伪位萎 伪谓维纬谓蠅蟽畏.
螤慰位位慰蠉蟼 伪蟽蟺伪蟽渭慰蠉蟼.
伪蠀蟿蠈蟺蔚蟻喂蠁蟻蠈谓畏蟽畏 蟿慰蠀 畏未慰谓喂魏慰蠉 苇蟻蠅蟿伪,
蟿畏 渭维蟽魏伪 蔚蟺伪谓伪蟽蟿伪蟿喂魏萎蟼 未蟻维蟽畏蟼 蔚谓维谓蟿喂伪 蟽蟿畏谓 蟺蟻慰魏伪蟿维位畏蠄畏 纬喂伪 蟿畏谓 苇纬蠂蟻蠅渭畏 伪纬维蟺畏,
蟿畏谓 慰喂魏蔚委伪 伪蠁畏纬畏渭伪蟿喂魏萎 蠁蠉蟽畏 蟿畏蟼 蟺蟻蠅蟿伪纬蠅谓委蟽蟿蟻喂伪蟼, 伪蠀蟿萎, 蟺慰蠀 蠂伪蟻伪魏蟿畏蟻委味蔚蟿伪喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蟻慰魏位畏蟿喂魏萎
魏伪喂 维谓蔚蟿畏 蟺蔚蟻畏蠁维谓蔚喂伪 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿维谓蟿喂伪蟼 蟿畏蟼
魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪蟺蔚谓慰蠂慰蟺慰喂畏渭苇谓畏 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭伪蟿喂魏萎 谓慰畏渭慰蟽蠉谓畏 蟿蠅谓 畏蟻蠋蠅谓.
螌位伪 蟺蟻慰纬蟻伪渭渭伪蟿喂蟽渭苇谓伪 渭蔚 苇谓伪谓 蟽魏伪谓未伪位蠋未畏, 蠂蔚喂蟻喂蟽蟿喂魏蠈 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 蟺蟻慰蟼 蟿慰谓 伪谓伪纬谓蠋蟽蟿畏,
蟽蔚 伪蠀蟿蠈谓, 蟺慰蠀 畏 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻谓蔚喂
谓伪 蟿慰谓 蟺蔚蟻维蟽蔚喂 伪渭苇蟽蠅蟼 蟽蟿慰蠀蟼 尾伪胃蠉蟿蔚蟻慰蠀蟼 渭慰谓慰位蠈纬慰蠀蟼.
螒蠀蟿慰蠉蟼,蟺慰蠀 蟿伪 尾蟻维未喂伪 蟺蟻慰蟽蟺伪胃慰蠉谓 谓伪 蟽魏慰蟿蠋蟽慰蠀谓
蟿喂蟼 伪喂蟽胃萎蟽蔚喂蟼 苇谓蟿伪蟽畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟺伪蟻苇魏魏位喂蟽畏蟼,
伪蟺慰 蟿伪 渭蠀蟽蟿喂魏维 蟺慰蠀 魏蟻伪蟿维蔚喂 畏 蠄蠀蠂萎 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 魏伪蟻未喂维,
蔚谓蠋 畏 味蠅萎 蟿畏蟼 谓蠉蠂蟿伪蟼 蟿蠅谓 未喂伪位蠈纬蠅谓,
伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蔚 位伪蠂伪谓喂伪蟽渭苇谓蔚蟼 伪谓伪蟺谓慰苇蟼 魏伪喂 位蠀纬渭慰蠉蟼 蟺维胃慰蠀蟼,
蠂蟿蠀蟺维蔚喂 渭蔚 苇谓伪 胃蠀蟽喂伪蟽渭苇谓慰 胃蟻维蟽慰蟼 蟿喂蟼 蟺蠈蟻蟿蔚蟼 蟿畏蟼 蟽蠀谓蔚委未畏蟽畏蟼 魏伪喂 味畏蟿维蔚喂,
蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂伪 蟽蠁维位渭伪蟿伪,
纬喂伪 谓伪 渭畏谓 蟺蔚胃维谓蔚喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蔚委谓伪 蟿蠅谓 畏胃蠋谓 魏伪喂 蟿蠅谓 蟺伪蟻伪未蠈蟽蔚蠅谓.
螝维蟿喂 蟿苇蟿慰喂蔚蟼 苇谓谓慰喂蔚蟼 蟺蠅位慰蠉谓蟿伪喂 蟺伪谓维魏蟻喂尾伪
蟽蟿伪 蟺伪味维蟻喂伪 蟿蠅谓 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓蠅谓 伪蟺慰喂魏喂慰魏蟻伪蟿喂蠋谓 魏伪喂 蠈蟺慰喂慰蟼 未蔚谓 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻蔚喂 谓伪 蠂伪蟻委蟽蔚喂
魏伪喂 谓伪 未蔚蠂蟿蔚委 魏蟻伪蠀纬苇蟼 伪谓蔚委蟺蠅蟿畏蟼 蔚蠀未伪喂渭慰谓委伪蟼,
味蠅谓蟿伪谓苇蟼 魏伪喂 维纬蟻喂蔚蟼 ,
蟺蔚胃伪委谓蔚喂 伪蟺慰 蟽蟺伪蟽渭苇谓畏 魏伪蟻未喂维
蟽蟿慰 伪蟺伪蟻蟿蠂维喂谓蟿 蟿蠅谓 伪蟻胃蟻蠅蟿蠋谓 蠀蟺慰尾喂尾伪蟽渭蠋谓 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪蠈蟻喂蟽蟿畏 苇魏位蔚喂蠄畏 蟿慰蠀 芦蔚蟻伪蟽蟿萎禄蟺慰蠀 蟺维谓蟿伪 胃伪 魏伪蟿伪未喂魏维味蔚蟿伪喂.
螤维谓蟿伪 胃伪 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 谓伪 伪纬伪蟺萎蟽蔚喂 蟺苇蟻伪 伪蟺慰 蟿慰谓 蠁蠈尾慰, 蟺苇蟻伪 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 魏蠀蟻喂伪蟻蠂委伪 蟿畏蟼 伪蟻谓畏蟿喂魏蠈蟿畏蟿伪蟼
魏伪喂 未蔚谓 胃伪 蠁慰尾维蟿伪喂 谓伪 蟺蔚胃维谓蔚喂,
伪蠁慰蠉 魏伪喂 蠅蟼 味蠅谓蟿伪谓蠈蟼 尾委蠅谓蔚 蟿畏谓 魏伪胃畏渭蔚蟻喂谓蠈蟿畏蟿伪
蟿慰蠀 魏蔚谓慰蠉, 蟿慰蠀 维未蔚喂慰蠀 蟺蠀蟻萎谓伪 蟿畏蟼 蠄蠀蠂萎蟼
蟺慰蠀 苇蠂蔚喂 萎未畏 蟺蔚蟿维尉蔚喂 渭伪魏蟻喂维, 未喂蠈蟿喂 未蔚谓 维谓蟿蔚尉蔚 蟿慰 蠂维慰蟼 蟿畏蟼 蔚蟺喂尾慰位萎蟼 蟿蠅谓 慰喂魏慰纬蔚谓蔚喂伪魏蠋谓 蟽蠂蔚未委蠅谓 纬喂伪 蟿伪 蔚纬魏位萎渭伪蟿伪 蟺慰蠀 魏伪胃蠈蟻喂味伪谓 维蟺蔚喂蟻蔚蟼 伪谓蔚蟻伪蟽蟿蔚蟼 纬蔚谓喂苇蟼.
螤蠈蟽慰 蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂慰, 尾伪胃喂维 蟽喂蠅蟺畏蟻蠈 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蟿慰 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭伪蟿喂魏蠈 伪谓蟿委位伪位慰 魏伪喂 蟺慰位蠀蟺位慰魏蠈蟿伪蟿慰 蟽蟿蠀位 纬蟻伪蠁萎蟼.
纬喂伪 渭喂伪 未喂蟿蟿萎 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪 蟺维胃慰蠀蟼 魏伪喂 渭喂伪 蟺伪蟻维未慰尉畏 伪渭畏蠂伪谓委伪 蠁喂位慰蟽慰蠁委伪蟼 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蟿慰 伪魏伪蟿苇蟻纬伪蟽蟿慰 渭委蟽慰蟼,
蟿畏 味蠅萎 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 胃维谓伪蟿慰.
螘委谓伪喂 苇谓伪 蔚蟻蠅蟿喂魏蠈 伪蟻喂蟽蟿慰蠉蟻纬畏渭伪 未喂伪蟺慰位喂蟿喂蟽渭喂魏慰蠉 蟻慰渭伪谓蟿喂蟽渭慰蠉 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 纬魏蟻委味蔚蟼 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委蔚蟼
魏伪喂 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蔚 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂蔚蟼 蟺苇蟿蟻喂谓蔚蟼, 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓蔚蟼, 蟽喂蠅蟺畏位苇蟼 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 渭伪谓委伪 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿维胃位喂蠄畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿畏 伪谓维纬魏畏 蟿慰蠀 蔚蟽蠅蟿蔚蟻喂魏慰蠉 渭慰谓慰位蠈纬慰蠀,
伪蠀蟿慰蠉, 蟺慰蠀 渭伪蟼 伪蟺慰魏伪位蠉蟺蟿蔚喂 蟺蠅蟼 畏 蟽喂蠅蟺萎 蠂蟻畏蟽喂渭慰蟺慰喂蔚委蟿伪喂 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪
蟿畏蟼 畏蟻蠅委未伪蟼-伪蠁畏纬萎蟿蟻喂伪蟼 蠅蟼 蠈蟺位慰 纬喂伪 谓伪 蟽魏慰蟿蠋蟽蔚喂 慰 苇谓伪蟼 蟿慰谓 维位位慰谓.
螔伪胃喂维 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿畏 畏 未蠉谓伪渭畏 蟿畏蟼 魏伪蟿伪蠂蟻畏蟽蟿喂魏萎蟼 蟽蠀纬纬苇谓蔚喂伪蟼, 未苇蠂蔚蟿伪喂 魏伪喂 伪蠁慰蟻委味蔚喂 蟿畏谓 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠀渭苇谓畏 伪纬维蟺畏 伪谓维渭蔚蟽伪 蟽蟿畏谓 未喂魏萎 蟿慰蠀蟼
15蠂蟻慰谓畏 螕伪位位委未伪 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 谓蔚伪蟻蠈 螝喂谓苇味慰 蔚蟻伪蟽蟿萎,
纬蠈谓慰 蔚谓蠈蟼 蔚魏伪蟿慰渭渭蠀蟻喂慰蠉蠂慰蠀,
维胃蟻伪蠀蟽蟿慰蠀 魏伪喂 伪蟺伪蟻苇纬魏位喂蟿伪 蟽蠀渭渭慰蟻蠁蠅渭苇谓慰蠀 蟽蟿喂蟼 蠀蟺慰未蔚委尉蔚喂蟼 蟿畏蟼 蔚胃谓喂魏萎蟼 蟿慰蠀 蟺伪蟻维未慰蟽畏蟼.
螚 Duras 渭蔚 伪尉喂慰胃伪蠉渭伪蟽蟿畏 渭伪蔚蟽蟿蟻委伪 魏伪蟿伪蠁苇蟻谓蔚喂 渭苇蟽伪 伪蟺慰 蟿伪 渭伪魏蟻喂谓维, 蟺苇蟿蟻喂谓伪, 伪蟺慰位喂胃蠅渭苇谓伪 魏伪喂 伪未喂伪蟺苇蟻伪蟽蟿伪 魏慰渭渭维蟿喂伪 蟿畏蟼 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪蟼 谓伪 蔚蠁伪蟻渭蠈蟽蔚喂 蟿畏谓 蟽喂蠅蟺萎 蠅蟼 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 苇魏蠁蟻伪蟽畏蟼 蟿慰蠀 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃萎渭伪蟿慰蟼.
韦畏谓 伪纬维蟺畏蟽伪. 螕喂 伪蠀蟿蠈 魏伪喂 渭蠈谓慰.
鉁ㄢ湪鉁ㄢ湪鉁ㄢ湪
螝伪位萎 伪谓维纬谓蠅蟽畏.
螤慰位位慰蠉蟼 伪蟽蟺伪蟽渭慰蠉蟼.
August 15, 2017
Desire. Is it pleasure or pain? Can and should we try to control it? To trust it? To understand it? Do we shape our desires or do they shape us? What part of us is desire? Is it the purest and deepest aspect of human nature? Where does it come from? Can a desire on its own be vile or virtuous or only actions are bound to be judged? How much do we know about our desires and where do they lead us? What brings two people together? What brings together a French girl and Chinese man twelve years older than her? Set in the 1930s in Indochina, this is a tale about two people trying to break their bonds, but unable to do so. They are kindred spirits in more ways than one. They are both oppressed by their families, they are both unable to understand their feelings. They lose themselves in passion that is born from more than romance. It is a passion for change, for freedom. But can there be truly freedom in desire? Is desire bound to enslave us or free us? Buddhists believe that desire is the reason for all human suffering and only liberation of desire may lead to ultimate happiness. But along with pain can we also find pleasure in unfulfilled desires? Is all longing pain and dissatisfaction? Can it be an inspiration, a fuel? Don鈥檛 those of us focusing only on present pleasures close the doors for achieving greater ones? Should we give up the possibility for more in order to fully enjoy what we have now or should we sacrifice some of that bliss for the hope of a bigger one? Longing brings pain and emptiness with itself, but it also makes the good part even better. Which is better? An ordinary, calm, perfect happiness or happiness stained by the pain which comes with longing, but also enriched by the intensity and passion that come along with it? The former sounds better if we accept that happiness is just a lack of pain. But Is it just that? In 鈥淣otes from the Underground鈥� it is explored the idea of finding pleasure in pain. People don鈥檛 just desire what they cannot have. They also desire what ultimately can never bring them happiness. Often the greatest joys and sorrows are consequences of each other. This is a story of doomed lovers, who love each other with all the intensity and passion of people who know they are about to lose each other. "He didn鈥檛 speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he鈥檇 close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he鈥檇 loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me.". Do we treasure the most that which we are bound to lose? Do we sometimes risk to lose it in order to feel it more intensely? If we always want more, does that make us adventurers, masochists, seekers of wisdom鈥r maybe just people? Desire can built us or ruin us. Sometimes is does both. If desire is pleasure and pain equally, how do we cope? How do the protagonists do it? She admits her feelings only in the end, when she has already lost him. Maybe because she was afraid that loving him would make the loss all the more painful? But it would have made the anterior pleasure all the greater and wouldn鈥檛 those precious moments, her getting everything she can out of them, eventually be a consolation as well? Maybe this is why he loves pain. It is pain born out of feeling which he savours at its wholesome. Do we dare to be adventurous and desire or are we determined to treasure that which we already have? Dreams of the future can both enrich and rob us of our present. It is all about balance. We should always look with hope for the future and dream, but not in a way that makes us forget the value of that which we have now. We should always remember the value of what we already have, but we should also always remember to dream. Hadn鈥檛 great artists and adventurers dreamed and desired, we wouldn鈥檛 have had everything we have today. Worlds are built on dreams and desires.
Read count: 1
Read count: 1
January 27, 2019
Now I know why several friends have mentioned that this book has special meaning for them. I've never had a reading experience quite like this. A woman writing from her older years about her teenage experiences in Viet Nam with her Chinese lover, but also with her family. And also of her experience of Viet Nam itself--the natural world, the skies and trees and people, and customs both strange and familiar.
The book is an experiential wonder, slipping between past and present, the concrete observations of the moment and whimsical, beautiful thoughts of the natural world and the history of mankind. I loved so many of these interludes and cited many in my status updates.
And there is her much older lover, a man some 12 years older than this 15 year old girl who manifestly shouts to the world how strongly she does not love him. But what the truth was/is for her only to know:
For her too it was when the boat uttered its first
farewell, when the gangway was hauled up and the tugs
had started to tow and draw the boat away from land,
that she had wept. She'd wept without letting anyone
see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn't
to weep for that kind of lover. Wept without letting her
mother or her younger brother see she was sad, without
letting them see anything, as was the custom between
them. (p 111)
Was she crying for lost love, for her lost youth, for lost memories. We won't know. But there is despair as she leaves for France.
I feel that I have now truly read an actual soulful book. Duras' soul seems to permeate the entire piece in all its contradictions of emotions and feelings, observations of life and family, loves and hates and fears and hopes. For me the sometimes disconnected style was perfect for presenting and reflecting all of this.
Definitely recommended.
The book is an experiential wonder, slipping between past and present, the concrete observations of the moment and whimsical, beautiful thoughts of the natural world and the history of mankind. I loved so many of these interludes and cited many in my status updates.
And there is her much older lover, a man some 12 years older than this 15 year old girl who manifestly shouts to the world how strongly she does not love him. But what the truth was/is for her only to know:
For her too it was when the boat uttered its first
farewell, when the gangway was hauled up and the tugs
had started to tow and draw the boat away from land,
that she had wept. She'd wept without letting anyone
see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn't
to weep for that kind of lover. Wept without letting her
mother or her younger brother see she was sad, without
letting them see anything, as was the custom between
them. (p 111)
Was she crying for lost love, for her lost youth, for lost memories. We won't know. But there is despair as she leaves for France.
I feel that I have now truly read an actual soulful book. Duras' soul seems to permeate the entire piece in all its contradictions of emotions and feelings, observations of life and family, loves and hates and fears and hopes. For me the sometimes disconnected style was perfect for presenting and reflecting all of this.
Definitely recommended.
November 18, 2019
Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.
I don鈥檛 know what I was expecting when I picked this up. Sepia tinted nostalgia. Eroticism. Regrets. Sadness. I knew that it was a vaguely fictionized version of an episode of Duras鈥� adolescence, when she fell in love and began a sexual relation with an older Chinese businessman when she lived in French Indochina. I knew that it explored her fractured relationship with her mother and her nameless lover鈥檚 tensions with his own father. I had heard that it captured that strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, when the very act of breathing feels uncomfortable and ill-fitting, like weirdly cut clothes. I thought, sure, that sounds like a book I鈥檇 like. I picked up a copy, read over a rainy Monday and put it on my shelf feeling like I had been hit over the head.
The prose is fluid and dreamlike, probably because it鈥檚 the voice of an old woman looking back at her far away past: the details are vague, some faces are blurred and it can sometimes feel like Duras narrates her tale from a place of aloofness, but I feel like it鈥檚 simply the distance of years. When I look back at things that happened when I was fifteen, it almost feels like it happened to someone else 鈥� and I鈥檓 nowhere near seventy years old yet. The writing is also saturated with suffering, and it leaves a trace of pain like an oil slick over the whole story. Duras never complains about her circumstances, she simply wants to say 鈥淭his happened. It damaged me. I kept living anyway.鈥� And yet it is impossible not empathize with her loneliness, her resentment, her feelings of abandonment and her need to feel like someone wants and values her.
Obviously, everything about this coupling is forbidden: the lovers鈥� age, race and class differences mean their relationship will never be anything but doomed, but they need each other to escape their respective misery, feeling that the only peace and understanding they will ever find is with the other.
Many people have compared it to 鈥淟olita鈥� (/review/show...), because it鈥檚 a disturbing story about an older man and a young 鈥済irl鈥�, beautifully written. It is unsettling, but I didn鈥檛 feel like it was the relationship between the girl and the business man that was wrong: it was the abuse they both suffered. When you are damaged, sometimes you find comfort in the strangest places, and I doesn鈥檛 feel like it鈥檚 my place to judge them. "Lolita" was horrifying because Humbert made Lo suffer; "The Lover" is moving because they are united by their pain.
I don鈥檛 know what I was expecting when I picked this up. Sepia tinted nostalgia. Eroticism. Regrets. Sadness. I knew that it was a vaguely fictionized version of an episode of Duras鈥� adolescence, when she fell in love and began a sexual relation with an older Chinese businessman when she lived in French Indochina. I knew that it explored her fractured relationship with her mother and her nameless lover鈥檚 tensions with his own father. I had heard that it captured that strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, when the very act of breathing feels uncomfortable and ill-fitting, like weirdly cut clothes. I thought, sure, that sounds like a book I鈥檇 like. I picked up a copy, read over a rainy Monday and put it on my shelf feeling like I had been hit over the head.
The prose is fluid and dreamlike, probably because it鈥檚 the voice of an old woman looking back at her far away past: the details are vague, some faces are blurred and it can sometimes feel like Duras narrates her tale from a place of aloofness, but I feel like it鈥檚 simply the distance of years. When I look back at things that happened when I was fifteen, it almost feels like it happened to someone else 鈥� and I鈥檓 nowhere near seventy years old yet. The writing is also saturated with suffering, and it leaves a trace of pain like an oil slick over the whole story. Duras never complains about her circumstances, she simply wants to say 鈥淭his happened. It damaged me. I kept living anyway.鈥� And yet it is impossible not empathize with her loneliness, her resentment, her feelings of abandonment and her need to feel like someone wants and values her.
Obviously, everything about this coupling is forbidden: the lovers鈥� age, race and class differences mean their relationship will never be anything but doomed, but they need each other to escape their respective misery, feeling that the only peace and understanding they will ever find is with the other.
Many people have compared it to 鈥淟olita鈥� (/review/show...), because it鈥檚 a disturbing story about an older man and a young 鈥済irl鈥�, beautifully written. It is unsettling, but I didn鈥檛 feel like it was the relationship between the girl and the business man that was wrong: it was the abuse they both suffered. When you are damaged, sometimes you find comfort in the strangest places, and I doesn鈥檛 feel like it鈥檚 my place to judge them. "Lolita" was horrifying because Humbert made Lo suffer; "The Lover" is moving because they are united by their pain.
April 22, 2022
Marguerite Duras has written the remarkable story of her childhood love affair with a wealthy older man who happened to be Chinese. Their tumultuous love affair took place in pre-war Saigon in 1929. The book is written with exquisite language expressing perfectly the powerful emotions of an innocent girl as she experiences first love with an exotic and loving older man.
The young French girl faces disgrace on many levels. She is no longer respected because of the illicit affair; the fact that she is white and he is Chinese is unacceptable in 1929 Vietnamese society. Her lover is betrothed to a Chinese woman he鈥檚 yet to meet. He is torn between the love he feels for the young French girl and family obligation. But he has no choice. He will lose his inheritance and shame his family if he does not follow through with the arranged marriage.
Their love affair is beautifully drawn, loving, tender, and erotic. The dialogue is stunning, a memorable and heart rending novel. The sad life of the young French girl is well described, which probably explains her desire and need for love and escape from her desolate world. The ending will stay with you.
鈥溾€he wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn鈥檛 sure she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
WINNER OF FRANCE'S PRIX GONCOURT
The young French girl faces disgrace on many levels. She is no longer respected because of the illicit affair; the fact that she is white and he is Chinese is unacceptable in 1929 Vietnamese society. Her lover is betrothed to a Chinese woman he鈥檚 yet to meet. He is torn between the love he feels for the young French girl and family obligation. But he has no choice. He will lose his inheritance and shame his family if he does not follow through with the arranged marriage.
Their love affair is beautifully drawn, loving, tender, and erotic. The dialogue is stunning, a memorable and heart rending novel. The sad life of the young French girl is well described, which probably explains her desire and need for love and escape from her desolate world. The ending will stay with you.
鈥溾€he wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn鈥檛 sure she hadn鈥檛 loved him with a love she hadn鈥檛 seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.鈥�
WINNER OF FRANCE'S PRIX GONCOURT
March 14, 2025
At the very center of 鈥淭he Lover鈥� is a dysfunctional family. The mother's and eldest brother's inability to live is reflected in a harrowing way in one of the protagonist's memories: because her mother has set the electric incubators incorrectly, six hundred chicks are born with deformed beaks, unable to eat. They starve to death. The stench of the carcasses forces the protagonist to vomit while eating in her mother's castle.听
The inability to eat because she smells the death of those who were unable to eat.听
Likewise, decades earlier, as a fifteen-year-old, she loves a Chinese man more than ten years her senior, although she has never really experienced love. She takes his money and his desire. It is a moral transgression and at the same time an angry initiation. Gretchen is 鈥渙ver fourteen鈥� when Faust - a man of about fifty - impregnates her. Does literature justify hebephilia?
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is strongly autobiographical. Here, a woman comes to terms with what happened to her decades ago in the Vietnam of her youth. Splinters of her past are artfully strung together in a collage-like and achronological manner, ultimately creating a miasmic diorama that is composed of clear, unpretentious words despite the madness raging beneath the surface.听
Writing, it seems, is her salvation. The pen in her hand is her beak, with which she feeds herself and the reader at the same time. Some will remain hungry, some will gag. But the artful composition will fill you up.
The inability to eat because she smells the death of those who were unable to eat.听
Likewise, decades earlier, as a fifteen-year-old, she loves a Chinese man more than ten years her senior, although she has never really experienced love. She takes his money and his desire. It is a moral transgression and at the same time an angry initiation. Gretchen is 鈥渙ver fourteen鈥� when Faust - a man of about fifty - impregnates her. Does literature justify hebephilia?
鈥淭he Lover鈥� is strongly autobiographical. Here, a woman comes to terms with what happened to her decades ago in the Vietnam of her youth. Splinters of her past are artfully strung together in a collage-like and achronological manner, ultimately creating a miasmic diorama that is composed of clear, unpretentious words despite the madness raging beneath the surface.听
Writing, it seems, is her salvation. The pen in her hand is her beak, with which she feeds herself and the reader at the same time. Some will remain hungry, some will gag. But the artful composition will fill you up.
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