In French Indochina, a French teenage girl embarks on a reckless and forbidden romance with a wealthy, older Chinese man, each knowing that knowledge of their affair will bring drastic consequences to each other. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Jane March, Tony Ka Fai Leung, Frédérique.
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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 have to agree with you, The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. He was elegant, not a white man but wearing European clothes. Again I remember myself, walking hand in hand with a year-old man when I was just sixteen. 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.
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He slowly comes over to you. I was still a boy, at And you simply got into his car. A barely discernible distress suddenly seized you, weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. 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. He says he loves you madly, says it very softly. He looked at you in horror, asked, Is that what you want? You said it is. Then you let him say it.
You were a cool one, weren't you? 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. Some of them go mad. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. 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: You told me how it all started, I want to write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. 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. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable.
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.
The Lover: A Film and Book Review
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. And your mother, that went on living even after you left her. Or what you told me happened in Paris. Or my years in London and New York.
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. View all 54 comments. Mar 08, Dolors rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: The ones who love and the ones who don't. 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. She never expected to fall in love with him.
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She was only worn out with desire. And her dysfunctional family of European colonizers needed the money. 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. Then I realized it was he. And finally I understood it was much more. 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.
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. 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 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. View all 53 comments. Mar 01, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: An autobiographical story about an affair between a young French girl and a Chinese man, set in Saigon, The Lover wavers between repression and indulgence.
The narrator's tone is detached, the description sparse, the narrative fragmented; in spite of the the cool aloofness of Duras's prose, though, the sensual infuses the novella. Each image glints and radiates a warmth much at odds with the narrator's emotional reticence. So, too, does the narrator's tendency to return to describing a few centr An autobiographical story about an affair between a young French girl and a Chinese man, set in Saigon, The Lover wavers between repression and indulgence.
So, too, does the narrator's tendency to return to describing a few central images, capturing them from different angles, lend the photographic text a cyclical and erotic quality. For all of the novella's sensuousness, it is in the end a rather disturbing tale. Be it the abuse the narrator suffers from her family or the exploitative conditions under which she meets with her 'lover,' trauma defines her life, and the novella reads more as a survival narrative than it does a romance.
View all 16 comments. Jan 03, karen rated it liked it Shelves: View all 95 comments. A world away from the intelligence insulting and glorified trash of E. 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 A world away from the intelligence insulting and glorified trash of E. 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. View all 11 comments. 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 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 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. Once I took all of this in, I tried to resume reading the Post. Later the same week, we happened to be on the same ferry again. 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.
- The Lover by Marguerite Duras.
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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. That moment, in my eyes, has been engraved in my mind for fifty years. The image is true, and so now is my memory. 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.
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. 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. 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. Still I knew that you would never love me, that you could never love me.
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 made his position very clear. But it must have affected me subliminally.
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For a long time, it seemed as if that torrent would never stop. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. View all 57 comments. It has been translated to 43 languages and was awarded the Prix Goncourt. It was adapted to film in 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, wea 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 man.
She attracts the attention of a year-old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. Jul 07, Samra Yusuf rated it really liked it. 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.
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! View all 25 comments. Oct 13, Vessey rated it really liked it Recommended to Vessey by: Is it pleasure or pain? Can and should we try to control 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.
What brings together a French girl and Chinese man twelve years older than her? Set in the s 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? 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.
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? 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. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes.
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? 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. Worlds are built on dreams and desires. Apr 02, Praj rated it it was amazing Shelves: 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 Dearest Marguerite, I know it is awfully late now, to write to you. 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.
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 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. View all 14 comments. 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. It is a tale of Marguerite Something dark and deeply unsettling simmers angrily beneath the surface of this narrative.
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-Five ish 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. 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. 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.
View all 26 comments. Jan 12, Duane rated it it was amazing Shelves: 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 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. The girl is an outcast in her own dysfunctional family, a family that is struggling to hold it's place, economically and emotionally, in the strange and ancient culture of Vietmam. Mar 09, Aubrey rated it really liked it Shelves: 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. 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 The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.
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. 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 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. He wanted to know if I had read Duras. Once again, I had not. I registered the title, wondering if it was some kind of romance novel.
I started The Lover on the flight back to Florida, where I was living at the time, compelled and confounded by a novel that opens as this one does:. One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now.
What a fearless plunge of an opening. What a masterful command of tone. What a lesson in narrative authority. The second encounter was in Florida, in an attempt to recover from the first. The third was in a French literature class in graduate school. The fourth was in Baltimore, in preparation to teach the novel. Again in Boston and again in Maine, near winter. There are so many books in the world.
There are so many books that, over the course of my lifetime, I will never read. Maybe driven by this knowledge, or maybe because I got something of a late start as a reader, I am not a chronic re-reader of novels, preferring instead to keep bounding into the unknown. I do, however, have a very small group of books I continually revisit, The Lover chief among them. Through the years, I have come to think of The Lover as a lake without a bottom, or perhaps more accurately with a bottom that is ever-shifting: The first time I read it, on the edge of love myself, I was swept up in the eroticism of the affair between the teenage narrator and a man in his twenties.
In teaching the book, the conversation often looped back to the structure, which is guided by image and repetition, a kind of dream-logic, as opposed to conventional narrative patterns. In an even later reading, The Lover seemed to be most urgently a story about a young woman awakening to artistic desire: In every reading, I have been stunned still by language that is at once crystalline and enigmatic: The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand.
Autobiographical novels are sometimes associated with youth, but The Lover was published in , when Duras was 70, which is to say it was a work that arrived late in her career as a writer—and also late in her career as a serious alcoholic, though The Lover was written during a period of relatively new sobriety. Several years after the publication of The Lover , Duras fell into a coma that lasted for months she recovered.
By 81, she would be dead of cancer. I was not able to attend the discussion, but listened to an audio recording with great interest.