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��Very early in my life it was too late.��
and
��Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.��

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’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).


Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve 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 “man from Cholon�� 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

��He breathes her in, the child��
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished��
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up��
I became his child.��

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’s 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’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.

��How can innocence be disgraced?��
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.

Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!


Image: Woman waving a red flag (.)

In 18 months, they don’t 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 ��Love... in its first violence��!

Ambiguous Morality

Duras�� interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:

�� When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.

�� She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.

�� She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.

�� But she also writes that she’s ��where she has to be, placed here��, which sounds like less of a choice.

�� Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
��She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.��

Ambiguous Truth

��The story of my life does not exist.��

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 ��that might have been taken��, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for ��crucial ambiguity��. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?

However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, 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

�� “The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour�� and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.��

�� “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.��

�� “When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.��

�� “Their 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�� the mysterious death of lovers without love.��

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’ve 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’s 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’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings.