The Lover by Marguerite Duras Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Lover
Book Review: A Book For Writers
Summary: 5 Stars
It's not that Duras threw away the rules, but how well she understood them and knew how to use them.The book starts out using Historical Present Tense to create a particular feeling in the reader, and when our heroine becomes too emotionally engaged, Duras creates a feeling of withdrawl by switching from First Person to Third Person.
This is brilliance, and greatly unappreciated.
Book Review: A Tautly Written Novel of Memory and Erotic Yearning
Summary: 5 Stars
Winner of France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 1984, "The Lover" is a tautly written, first person narrative of a fifteen year old French girl's affair with a Chinese man nearly twice her age in Vietnam circa 1930. Like other works of Marguerite Duras, "The Lover" conflates a vivid and deeply sensuous literary imagination with thinly-veiled autobiographical elements and a non-linear, ever shifting perspective. The result is a short, powerful novel of memory and erotic yearning. a novel which lingers in the reader's mind long after the last page.Neither the girl nor her Chinese lover has a name. The girl meets the Chinese lover on a ferry, seeing him in a limousine while she is returning to boarding school in Saigon. She is wearing a flat brimmed fedora hat, a silk dress turned sepia-toned with age, and gold lame high heels. She is a girl who is accustomed to people looking at her. "People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old white girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother's men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis."
Each is a starkly drawn character acting in ways that seem predestined. The Chinese lover does not intend to marry her, only to be her lover. The girl surrenders to what seems her fate. "She agreed to come as soon as he asked her the previous evening. She's where she has to be, placed here. She feels a tinge of fear. It's as if this must be not only what she expects, but also what had to happen especially to her. She says, I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you usually do with women."
It is a deeply moving erotic tale. It is also a tale of the girl's troubled life, of her strained relationships with her mother and her two brothers, and the way those relationships color her affair. Her mother speaks of "blatant prostitution and laughs at the scandal." And in her elder brother's presence, the Chinese man "ceases to be [her] lover." "He doesn't cease to exist, but he's no longer anything to me. He becomes a burnt-out shell."
Written in one short paragraph after another, moving back and forth in time, ever changing its narrative locus, "The Lover" paints a fictional world of eroticism, longing and memory. The result is a compelling work of fiction, nothing less than a minor masterpiece of Twentieth century French literature.
Book Review: A gripping and sympathetic story with question in morality.
Summary: 4 Stars
Set in more than half a century before. It's arduous to understand the situation for that time being. But through the describtion of Marguerite Duras, I do feel the contradictory circumstances for a white girl in a place with entirely different cultures from her home country. Being tied with poverty, living in a strange countries, and having only one trustworthy friend are already painful enough. Worse still, she's receive no true love from her family, but violence. Though it may sound fruitless, jarring or even disgusting for her to be with the Chinese guy, it seems to be forgivable. It's a good book showing how one may be influenced alongside with the political, social as well as family situations and backgrounds.Book Review: All time favorite!
Summary: 5 Stars
I had been watching this movie over and over for years, ever since it came out, and finally noticed the book here on Amazon. I was so excited! It has always been my favorite story, and now I treasure the book in my home. Truly an amazing story, you never need to know their names, as the characters they portray speak for themselves. The style in which it is written is just beautiful to me, and I love reading the book over and over just as I enjoyed watching the movie. I still cry at the end.Book Review: Amazing read
Summary: 5 Stars
L'Amant is an amazing book, full of sorrow and muted passion. It swept me away, and into my own sorrow about love. I read it several times. I've read about 5 novels by Duras, out of her huge catalogue of books (40 or so?). This one is definitely my favorite.Languid language, erotic yet not pornographic, sensual. Fully emotional yet emotionally distant at the same time.
Also, the novel is "semi-autobiographical". It chronicles the first person narrator's love affair with an older chinese man when she was just a poor young teenager. The story has been romanticized heavily from the real life story of Duras, who (I am told by a friend who studied her in depth) was prostituted by her mother to this rich chinese man in her youth. I regret I don't remember the differences between real-life and the book well now. But knowing this opened a further sadness to the story. But I suppose it was the author's way of beautifying a terrible experience she had had.
[Technically I haven't read this book, I read the original French version. But if I write this review for that edition no one will see it.]