The Lover by Marguerite Duras Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Lover
Book Review: Favourite.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favourite book ever. (Okay, it's tied with Winnie the Pooh, but it's still sitting pretty at number 1.) Why do I love this book? Because it is simple, beautiful, and heartbreaking; one long poem to a long-ago love.Book Review: Fine story from Duras
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an ok book, it tells the story about Duras affair as a young teenager, with an older Chinese man. During the account Duras changes between past and present tense. She also sometimes write about herself as "I" and sometimes in third person, I haven't really figured out why she makes these changes. The matarial of this book one supposes could actually be developed into a real moving novel, I don't know why Duras kept the story in this short form. Perhaps she was lazy? As it stand now it somewhat has a sketchy form, which perhaps is ok? But I think I would have prefered if she had made a longer and more elaborated novel out of the material. And those inconsistencies I mentioned in the start (about past and present tense and I account and third person) Well maybe the book would have been better without those litterary experiments?Book Review: From Lolita's point of view ...
Summary: 5 Stars
...well, not literally, but there certainly are parallels. This novella is set in Indochina, in the `30's, and is told, via fragments of the memory of an older woman now living in France, of her life as a precocious 15 year old, and her first sexual experiences, and perhaps, with the emphasis on the uncertainty, despite the title, of her first love. The book is light on eroticism; it is far more about the female use of sex for, if you will, "empowerment," which, in part, involves escape from an unhappy childhood situation. In gold lame high-heels and a foppish male hat, she meets her lover (or victim?), a 27 year old son of a Chinese millionaire, on a ferry as they cross the Mekong.
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay for the movie, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," released 50 years ago. Far more so, the movie IS about love; like "The Lover," the love is trans-cultural, and each individual has experienced a significant trauma: the Japanese male was near Hiroshima, and lost family members there when the A-Bomb was dropped; she is French, and had a German officer as a lover in the village of Nevers, known for its "calme," and after the war she was ostracized as a "collabo," including having her hair shorn. "The Lover" also concerns West-East love, again, between a French woman (girl) and an Oriental male. The "trauma" each has experienced is more internalized, relating to their family. He can never be his "own man," living under the shadow of a domineering father. She lives in a very dysfunctional family, with a worthless elder brother, who keeps the family mired in poverty through his drug and gambling addictions, and a mother, from her Picardy farm, who worships him, largely neglecting the other two siblings.
For a novella, Duras has more insights than many a 600 page novel. Her style is rich and dense, and I do NOT feel that she is projecting the wisdom of a middle age woman back onto a 15-year old. Consider: "I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think." Or, "You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationships, or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it."
The book is also about the "expat" existence, that transcends the 40,000 French "colons," who were the raison d'etre for drawing both France, and later, the United States, into seemingly endless war, first for their "lifestyles," but later, for the "glory," "honor", and eventually, "saving face," of their respective countries. But this particular expat story did not involve riches, and a fancy lifestyle, but poverty, the "barely getting by," that was rather surprising, even though they too had servants. Consider: "... from the frightful loneliness of serving in out-posts up-country, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever and oblivion." They lived primarily in Sadec, a small town in the Mekong delta, which alas, I had never heard of. They did have a large house, with the veranda, and could see the "mountains of Siam," in the evening, which was the only puzzling part of the book, since clearly you couldn't.
That quibble aside, Marguerite Duras has written a rich, beautiful novel, concerning the time when we thought we were fresh, and awaking into one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence, and as will happen all too frequently, it was tawdry.
Book Review: Great movie - not for everyone.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ms. March was entrancing and the photography was superb. It's R rated with reason, and a fairly hard R in my opinion but there is really no way around that if you're true to the book which is probably historically accurate. I would recommend the book as well.
Book Review: Haunting literary erotica.
Summary: 5 Stars
The only way I can describe this book is to say that it is haunting. Today, it would not be published, for obvious reasons, but it is one of those books that transcend reality, to put it mildly. I have to say that the story of the young girl and her lover, the older man, was one in which the reader is drawn and can't seem to let go after the last word is read. It's a keeper, defintely. Also, check out the movie, which is just as good as the book, imho: The Lover.