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The Lover

(The Lover #1)

Marguerite Duras,

Barbara Bray (Translator),

Maxine Hong Kingston (Introduction)

3.74 · Rating details · 37,574 ratings · 2,769 reviews

Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man. (from Wikipedia)

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Paperback, 117 pages

Published September 8th 1998 by Pantheon Books (first published September 1st 1984)

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Jan 24, 2015 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it

Shelves: the-french, book-to-film

***AWARDED THE 1984 PRIX GONCOURT***

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre 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.”

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’t find her pretty.

She cuts her hair off.

S ...more

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Dec 17, 2015 Lizzy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites-of-all-times, classics-literay-fiction, stars-5, read-years-ago

I opened the first page of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, 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 I opened the first page of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, 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’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t make them forget it. We daughters recognize them effortlessly as the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn’t 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’s 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’s 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’t 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’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to you. He doesn’t smile to begin with. He’s obviously nervous. Was it so easy to get into this man’s car, dear friend? I don’t know if I would have had the courage or the temerity. That’s a clue that even though sisters, we are inherently different. And he presented himself, I was thin and soft and naïve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I’m 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’s 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’t. He says he loves you madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. You don’t answer. You could say you don’t love him. You say nothing. But you did not stop at that, no, you said, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d 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’ll 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’s 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’s so simple, it was the writing that saved us! You told me how it all started,

I want to write. I’ve already told my mother. That’s what I want to do–write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, when you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s 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’s jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I’ll 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’s ok; I forgive you, my friend. But I remember so well what you said once, I’ve 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’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. And your mother, that went on living even after you left her. Let’s 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’s 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.' ...more

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Jul 07, 2018 Samra Yusuf rated it really liked it

And the time comes, when we’ve 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’d 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 And the time comes, when we’ve 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’d 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’ve all been the lovers and we’ve loved “A love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime…never.”
There’s nothing new in the tale, if you’re looking for a love story you’re gravely mistaken. There’s 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’s 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’s 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’ve 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.. ...more

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Mar 08, 2015 Dolors rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: The ones who love and the ones who don't

Shelves: read-in-2015

Who is “L’amant”(*)? 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 contort ...more

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Jan 03, 2010 karen rated it liked it

Shelves: littry-fiction, i-joined-a-bookclub

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 ...more

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Oct 04, 2010 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-book, fiction, classics, 20th-century, historical

(252 From 1001 Books) - L'Amant‬ = The Lover (The Lover #1), Marguerite Duras

The Lover is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984.

It has been translated to 43 languages and was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt.

It was adapted to film in 1992 as The Lover.

Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chin ...more

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Jan 12, 2017 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: france, classic-fiction

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 ...more

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Mar 01, 2015 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: recs, 2015

My full review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, can be found on my blog.

An autobiographical story about an affair between a young French girl and a Chinese man, set near Saigon, The Lover wavers between repression and indulgence. The tone is detached, the description spare, the narrative fragmented; in spite of the the cool aloofness of Duras's prose, though, the novel is incredibly sensual. Each image glints and radiates a warmth much at odds with the narrator's emotional reticence. Th ...more

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Feb 11, 2015 Cecily rated it liked it

Shelves: sexuality-gender-lgbtq, bildungsroman, biog-and-autobiog, china-japan-asia

“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, ...more

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Feb 24, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2013, reviews, reviews-4-stars, re-read, frogs

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 naïve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I’m sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I ...more

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Apr 02, 2010 Praj rated it it was amazing

Shelves: md

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 ...more

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Nov 11, 2016 Robin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, 1001-before-you-die, novella, literary-fiction, 2017, french, semi-autobiographical

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 c 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 Lolita, 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 lamé 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 ...more

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Jan 13, 2009 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: older-men-younger-women, french, story-review, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts

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 ess 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.

...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Samadrita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Samadrita by: Xiaolu Guo

Shelves: 1001-and-more, european-literature, france, novellas-short-novels-short-stories, disturbia, romance, feminism-feminist-undertones, melancholia, bygones-are-never-bygones, don-t-melt-my-melting-pot

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 ...more

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Oct 13, 2015 Vessey rated it really liked it

Recommended to Vessey by: Jeffrey

Shelves: 4-stars, erotica, romance

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 olde 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’t 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 “Notes from the Underground” it is explored the idea of finding pleasure in pain. People don’t 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’t speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he’d 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’d 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…or 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’t 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’t great artists and adventurers dreamed and desired, we wouldn’t have had everything we have today. Worlds are built on dreams and desires.

Read count: 1
...more

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Feb 20, 2015 Sue rated it really liked it

Shelves: vietnam, historical-fiction, classics, library-book, read-2015, france, asia

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 observ ...more

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Jan 12, 2015 Duane rated it it was amazing

Shelves: romance, reviewed-books, french, rated-books, 2015-book-challenge, guardian-1000

When I picked this book up I was drawn to the haunting picture of the girl on the cover, which turns out to be Marguerite Duras, the author. After reading I'm thinking, I can't believe this book is not more prominent in the mainstream of modern literature. It's a French novel, beautifully written, and set in early 20th century French Colonial Indochina, primarily Vietnam. It's the story of a 15 year old French girl and her affair with an older man, a wealthy Chinese. The girl is an outcast in he ...more

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Jun 05, 2018 Gabrielle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french, read-in-2018, reviewed, own-a-copy, ouch-my-feels

Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.

I don’t 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’ 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’s tensions with his own father. I had heard that it captured t Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.

I don’t 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’ 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’s 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’d 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’s 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’s 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 – and I’m 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 “This happened. It damaged me. I kept living anyway.” 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’ 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 “Lolita” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), because it’s a disturbing story about an older man and a young “girl”, beautifully written. It is unsettling, but I didn’t 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’t feel like it’s my place to judge them. "Lolita" was horrifying because Humbert made Lo suffer; "The Lover" is moving because they are united by their pain. ...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Aubrey rated it really liked it

Shelves: reality-check, french, antidote-translated, translated, r-2013, 1-read-on-hand, 4-star, 500-wm, reviewed, shorty-short

The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another fr

The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.

It's books like these that reaffirm the passage of time for me. Not in any form of stunning realization, but more of an acknowledgement of changing sensibilities, that a mere year ago I would have been hard pressed to give this book more than three stars. Nowadays the 'liked it' still applies more than the 'really liked it', but as there is additional 'respected it', 'found value in it', and even some 'heightened worth of previous readings due to it' in the mix, the four stars are worth their weight in spirit if not in letter.

Despite my recent diet of the short and sweet in both sentence and page length, I'm still more of a fan of the larger range of depth and breadth. I've had a great deal of luck with Jean Rhys and others, but my appreciation still comes less readily when I have less material to work with. Here, the gems were fewer and farther between, and the brightness was lessened to the point that I began to wonder about efficacy of translations and even the potential worth of watching the movie to more fully appreciate the book. But no matter. I'm still eyeing that movie, but the book has enough going for it for my full appreciation to build upon my more simplistic 'like'.

French Indochina was a new world of literature for me, as was Duras' writing from a viewpoint both strange and familiar. The older man with younger woman/girl is a fictional trope that is uncomfortably common, but it is a rare thing when the narration is so fully subsumed in the latter. The pages make for a strange immersion of vague hints coupled with all too present pain, a butterfly dagger that flits and pierces through both fact and thought, rarely resting at a comfortable distance before spanning too wide or delving too deep. The necessity of conscious stringing together so many small beads on such a long and tenuous wire was frustrating at times, but the ending brought with it a cohesiveness of clarity that made the journey worthwhile, if not explicit.

However, I am still left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, most due to the Orientalism question looming large over the European portrayal of Asian characters. Whether the writing was riddled with stereotypes or otherwise is a question that I am currently powerless to answer, due to my little experience with such literature. In that, this book has proved a gateway drug to a realm that I now know needs exploring, preferably from the viewpoints of the cultures themselves. Much to my chagrin, I have only one Vietnamese work in my virtual shelves, so any recommendations along the lines of that as well as other cultures encompassed by the Indochina label would be most welcomed.

One last note: now that I've finished off Proust's ISoLT to a satisfactory extent, I see it everywhere. Whether 'tis a blessing or a curse is never to be decided. ...more

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Sep 21, 2010 Fabian rated it liked it · review of another edition

A novella must ALWAYS make a deep impact. Hell, the writer did not think that more was necessary so whatever is there MUST be genius. "The Lover" is heartfelt, autobiographical, strange. The titular Chinese man is not even the focus: it is the brother & how his selfishness dooms the entire family. "L'amant" is about two people coming together in lust/love for only a moment... in solice or absolution. I like "adult" books but this one has the voice of a single victim in a long, sad tradition of " ...more

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Apr 27, 2017 Linda Wells rated it it was amazing

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 the 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 ...more

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Mar 04, 2009 Janet rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-books-under-120-pages

I loved the strangeness of this woman's interior, her voice, the way such a slim volume can sum up an entire life, compelling and erotic and intellectual all at once.
******************
rereading... it's like craving a certain great dish and you know just who has it on the menu.

Such assurance. I like the way Duras handles the point of view. It begins with an older voice, a woman looking back at her life, a particular moment of her life, and she uses the past tense, whereas when she is in the past I loved the strangeness of this woman's interior, her voice, the way such a slim volume can sum up an entire life, compelling and erotic and intellectual all at once.
******************
rereading... it's like craving a certain great dish and you know just who has it on the menu.

Such assurance. I like the way Duras handles the point of view. It begins with an older voice, a woman looking back at her life, a particular moment of her life, and she uses the past tense, whereas when she is in the past, in the point of view of the girl she was, she uses the present tense. The kind of thing a writer gets a kick out of...

I'd forgotten the way it opens, as the older woman thinks of her face, the ruined face which was already hers at 18, after the events which will unfold in the book. So much packed in to each small paragraph-long section, the resonance of each detail, the mystery of it.

********************
Such a short book, but a packs an amazing punch. Trying to figure out why.

Odd small digressions about two acquaintances in Paris during the war, years after the events of the book, one of whom who turned out to be a collaborator. Sideways glances at the family drama, the poisonous older brother, the weak younger brother, the ambivalent mother, haunted by poverty, living out her life in the French colony of Indochine... but always oblique.

Certain images burn brightly in my mind. Making love behind shutters in a crowded area of town, the voices of the people so close outside. The black limousine in which the Chinese lover, son of a millionaire, waits for the girl every day. The way the mother washes the house in the country out when she's overwhelmed by her own darkness-- a house built on stilts, it could just be sluiced clean, water poured on the floor in buckets, water pooling around the piano legs... And the girl on the ferry on the Mekong in the man's hat and gold lame shoes, waiting for her life to approach, the way that girls do.

The strength of these discrete images is one reason, but there's something else, something more... I'd have to say it's the way the girl's coldness and matter-of-factness create the story's mystery. The narrator, the older self, has that same tone-- but if she was truly as cold as she presents herself, why would she be going back over this moment in her life, the moment that she became the woman she would be for the rest of her life? What is she searching for?

The only likeable person in the book is the Chinese lover she all but destroys in his infatuation for her--not in an evil way, but just in the tough tough tough way of a young girl who has utterly accepted the world as it was presented to her. Her inability to love--or is it really an inability? Or is it something she cannot allow herself? So fascinating to see a young girl who isn't depicted as heady with romance--just the opposite. Here it's the man who can love, but he is weak, as she sees him, because he lacks cruelty, he is weak but he loves her "unto death." She does desire him, but it's funny that the girl can accept her desire, but insists she does not love him. And she is cruel, because she comes from a cruel family, a cruel colony, a cruel society, both aware of her privilege as a white girl in the East, and her shameful poverty.

What is continually fascinating about this book is that a story of a love affair is rarely told from the point of view of the one who does not love. This girl would usually be the obscure object of desire, not the subject. The mood of doom and exoticism and desire is hard to shake.

...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Ben Loory rated it it was ok

fragmented, drab, and full of unpleasant people. had a nice part about a hat though.

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Apr 04, 2012 Mary rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012, france, fiction

The book is like being trapped inside a deep and disturbing dream on a stifling hot summer night. A dream steeped in melancholy and half memories and you wake up choking. Is it Duras' writing style or the translation that creates the sparse atmosphere, the jumping around from present to memory to thoughts to...I'm not sure exactly what. But it worked so beautifully, so tragically.

Early in the book Duras writes about her mother in a way that did something to me. I found myself tearing up, my hear ...more

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Dec 18, 2009 K.D. Absolutely rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books; 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006-2010)

Shelves: sex, french

Probably the most famous among the many brilliant works of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), The Lover (French: L’Amant) is based on her actual experience while living in Vietnam during her teen years. Published in 1984, this autobiographical novel has been translated to 43 languages, awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt and was turned into a movie in 1992 starring Jane March as the 15-1/2-y/o French girl Duras and Tony Leung as 17-y/o Chinese Man.

Yes, the novel (as well as the movie where the scene Probably the most famous among the many brilliant works of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), The Lover (French: L’Amant) is based on her actual experience while living in Vietnam during her teen years. Published in 1984, this autobiographical novel has been translated to 43 languages, awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt and was turned into a movie in 1992 starring Jane March as the 15-1/2-y/o French girl Duras and Tony Leung as 17-y/o Chinese Man.

Yes, the novel (as well as the movie where the scene above was taken) is only for matured readers as it has descriptive sex scenes. The scenes, including the whole novel, are beautifully narrated. Duras made use of shifting first person and third person narrations. At first, I was confused me but later I thought that the reason for the shifts was that she, at some points, wanted to dissociate herself from what was happening in her life. Looking back, she wanted to recall those parts of her life to be like a dream. This should have taken a lot of courage in her part. As Duras published this book in 1984 when she was 70 years old and already a world-renowned novelist and film director. Imagine telling that you lost your virginity to a Chinese man when you were fifteen years old and you agressively did those sexual positions and uttered those unprintable words.

It was a tragic love affair. Both Duras and her lover were still young when they had all those sex and only realized that they loved each other when they were already apart. I was reminded by the young Rose throwing the Pearl of the Sea to the water while remembering Jack with fondless in the closing scenes of James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic. There is no similar scene in The Lover but the ship cabin scene while Chopin pieces were playing and with Duras was crying was particularly moving and you could feel her pain even just by reading those beautiful passages. It will surely make you remember your first love and trigger the what if questions once again.

In a nutshell, The Lover is like Duras' confession before her death twelve years after. It is about racism. The Duras family prohibited her to marry a Chinese while the rich father of her lover wanted him to marry the daughter of a daughter of another rich Chinese family. That even if her French family was penniless and hungry, they still felt superior compared to Asians (Chinese and Vietnamese included) because they have whiter skin. It is about love that blossomed too early to be be acknowledged as such but too late to come into fruition. It's really about the role of the society and how it influences the lives of the people at both sides (conquerors or conquered) of the world.

Kudos to Marguerite Duras. This is a lot better than her other book that I've read early this year, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964). Now, I am geared towards reading my third of her books, The Vice-Consul (1968).
...more

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Mar 13, 2015 Karen rated it really liked it

A little book about an intense, illicit affair between a 15 yr old poor white girl and a wealthy 27 year old Chinese man.
Duras writes a very atmospheric novella here..
I liked it

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Nov 03, 2011 Roxane rated it it was amazing

This is what they mean when they say, "lush prose." ...more

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Jan 28, 2019 Teresa rated it really liked it

Behind the image of the white girl, behind the black limousine and its owner, an older Chinese man, is the mentally ill mother, the not-there but always-there presence.

Behind the jumping around of the narrative voice from first- to third-person, over and over again, sometimes in the same paragraph, is the trauma.

Behind the fragmented telling, the circling around events, and the recurrence of several scenes is the attempt at reconciliation. Attempt only—some things cannot be reconciled.

Behind the ...more

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May 26, 2020 Anna Luce rated it did not like it

Shelves: 6-so-so-reads, 2020-reviews, ma-comparative-lit

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 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—“The 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.”—but her purple prose veers into the ridiculous.
There were also these childish attempts at introspection:
“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. I take the hat, and am never parted from it.”
Which seemed a mere echo of Arthur Rimbaud's “Je est un autre” (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.

Read more reviews on my blog / / / View all my reviews on Goodreads ...more

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Mar 31, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: pernod-and-gauloises, distaff, novellas

If you like lyrical romantic prose in staccato sentences, written in the literariest of all literary styles, this is the novella for you. If you don’t, this isn’t the novella for you. Me, I’ve read this story a million times before. Goodnight March.

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About Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras

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Marguerite Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914, in Gia Định, Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam). Her parents, Marie (née Legrand, 1877-1956) and Henri Donnadieu (1872-1921), were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School. They had both had previous marriages. Marguerite had two older siblings: Pierre, the eldest, and Paul.

Duras's father fell ill and h Marguerite Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914, in Gia Định, Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam). Her parents, Marie (née Legrand, 1877-1956) and Henri Donnadieu (1872-1921), were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School. They had both had previous marriages. Marguerite had two older siblings: Pierre, the eldest, and Paul.

Duras's father fell ill and he returned to France, where he died in 1921. Between 1922 and 1924, the family lived in France while her mother was on administrative leave. They then moved back to French Indochina when she was posted to Phnom Penh followed by Vĩnh Long and Sa Đéc. The family struggled financially and her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of rice farmland in Prey Nob,[2] a story which was fictionalized in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique.

In 1931, when she was 17, Duras and her family moved to France and she completed her baccalaureate. Duras returned to Saigon again with Paul and her mother in 1932 and completed her second baccalaureate, leaving Pierre in France. In 1933, Duras embarked alone for Paris to study law and mathematics. She soon abandoned this to concentrate on political science.[2] After completing her studies in 1938, she worked for the French government in the Ministry of the Colonies. In 1939, she married the writer Robert Antelme, whom she had met during her studies.

During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, Duras worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers and in the process operated a de facto book-censorship system. She also became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party) and a member of the French Resistance as a part of a small group that also included François Mitterrand, who later became President of France and remained a lifelong friend of Duras.

In 1943, when publishing her first novel, she began to use the surname Duras, after the town that her father came from, Duras.

In 1950, her mother returned to France, wealthy from property investments and from the boarding school she had run.

She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films, interviews, and short narratives, including her best-selling, apparently autobiographical work L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover. This text won the Goncourt prize in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other forms: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri, was released to great success in 1992.

Other major works include Moderato Cantabile, also made into a film of the same name, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and her film India Song. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais.

Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form (their 'romanticism' was criticised by fellow writer Raymond Queneau); however, with Moderato Cantabile she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the Nouveau roman French literary movement, although did not definitively belong to any group. Her films are also experimental in form, most eschewing synch sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story over images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less tangential.

Marguerite's adult life was somewhat difficult, despite her success as a writer, and she was known for her periods of alcoholism. She died in Paris, aged 82 from throat cancer and is interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Her tomb is marked simply 'MD'.

From wikipedia ...more

Other books in the series

The Lover (2 books)

Books by Marguerite Duras

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Quotes from The Lover

“Very early in my life it was too late.” — 679 likes

“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.” — 240 likes

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