The Lover by Marguerite Duras Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Lover
Book Review: Memories elucidated
Summary: 4 Stars
THE LOVER by Marguerite Duras, which was an international best seller and winner of the Prix Goncourt in France, tells the story of a young French girl growing up in Indochina in the 1930s and her affair with the son of a Chinese millionaire. She does not love him and his father refuses to allow them to stay together because she is white, but, to me, the love story, while serving as the reason for the story, is not the central focus. More riveting, I found was the emotional violence of the narrator's family life and the style in which it is written.The book is written expertly and experimentally in a way that moves like a recollecting mind among ideas, images and themes. At first this is disorienting to the reader, but it begins to feel very natural very quickly, because I think the style effectively mimics the way the mind flows back over our past. Duras wrote the reputedly semi-autobiographical book over four months in 1984 when she was nearly seventy years old.
The passages on the life of her family are tragic and, as I said, emotionally very violent. The nameless French narrator grows up with a poor mother who is a school mistress in Indochina and her two brothers. The elder brother seems to be incredibly self involved and coddled by their mother, but the younger siblings are afraid of him. Duras recounts his actions with a distance that makes his behaviors more frightening, and he emerges as a central force of the book.
The small book, a little over 100 pages, is hard to forget. It so well mimics the process of the mind, it begins to feel as if it is one's own memories, mined from all the connections thoughts seek to make when we look back to a time long past that won't let us go.
Book Review: More Hatred Than Love
Summary: 2 Stars
I had heard so much about this book that characterized it as an erotic masterpiece, an ode to passion and the story of a doomed cross-cultural romance--but in fact most of the book is about the author's hatred of her mother and her older brother. And while the sexual aspect of her love affair is central to the story, the descriptions are muted and very understated. Indeed, the romance is profoundly one-sided and the narrator only belatedly wonders if in fact she loved him at all.
Most of the book's energy derives from her vicious attacks on her manic-depressive mother and her morally corrupt monster of an elder brother, whom she describes as a killer, a hunter and a murderer--blaming him for the death of her younger brother, although how he was responsible is never made clear. So vivid and fierce is her bitterness and hatred for her mother and brother that it largely eclipses the more vaguely articulated love affair and indeed relegates the lover as a secondary character in a dim side-story.
The writing varies from marvelous, haunting prose to muddled and awkward philosophizing on life and death, frequently incomprehensible and repetitive. As a backdrop, French Indochina of the 1930s is portrayed both lovingly and with contempt, and the French colonial apartheid treated as a normal way of life. Marguerite Duras' own self-disdain is evident on every page.
I'm baffled that this book was such a grand success, even given the different tastes prevalent in 1984, or that it was made into such a fine film, which correctly ignored the negativity and focused on the passion. For me it was a monumental disappointment.
Book Review: Ms. Duras
Summary: 5 Stars
This book, written in a sparse style, is a recollection of Ms. Duras, her affair, her family, her environs in French Indochina during the late '20's and early '30's. Although it does bounce "back and forth," her style challenges you to "keep up." She is a thinker, this young girl. I encourage you to give this a read (get it at a good price) and see for yourself. It seems that the best stories are our own...Ms. Duras had quite a story to tell! Five stars!
P.S., If you haven't seen the movie, get a copy! The cinematography is the best I've seen in a foreign file - first rate!
Book Review: Poetry in Prose
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most beautifully written pieces of art! The story is very personal but it is the execution which is exquisite, and makes the story so. More impressionistic than the more detailed North China Lover, which was written after the success of The Lover, it is also more evocative. Very unique writing style.Book Review: Remembering the sexual past
Summary: 4 Stars
The Lover by Marquerite Duras is a well written book, structured like dreams and memories rather than a chronological or logical sequence of events and impressions. The book is short, a little over a 100 pages, and is written in short impressionistic paragraphs that move from present to various days in the past.
A French family in Indochina is reduced to working-poor status due to the death of the father and the mother's attempts to maintain the family while working as a school administrator. Yet this family if full of tensions since the mother favors the worthless older brother at the expense of the middle-child sister and younger brother. This mother barely can keep food on the table while trying to rescue the older son from debts, fights, and other problems. This allows the daughter to grow up too fast, acting as the mother for the emotionally neglected younger brother. The young woman sometimes is the narrarator and sometimes the story is told in third person. Duras pulls this off with ease.
What happens to girls that are forced to grow up too fast? This is really the theme of this wonderful book. For girls that are put in this position make bad choices and are exposed to too much adult pain too soon. Living in a boarding school with little supervision, she wears make-up too soon and dresses provocatively too soon. Duras hints that the young woman, though still a virgin, is contemplating prostitution. Wearing her mother's tight rust colored silk dress, with gold lame high heels, and a floppy man's hat, she is spotted by the son of a Chinese millionare. This man is 12 years older than she, making her 15 and thus making him 27. Their affair begins with her first act of intercourse. She is so nieve that she is surprised that she bleeds when penetrated. Yet she is so matter of fact about her body, throughout the novel, it is her instrument that she gradually learns to play.
In the early stages of the affair, her Chinese lover trembles and shakes as he seduces her and makes love to her. He is transparent in his obsession with her. Being still a child, she is not yet ready for the full release of Eros in the body, so she attends to the power she seems to have over this adult male. Gradually, with daily love making, she moves from the manipulative child -struggling to survive to an adult woman, learning to make love and all the vast range of variations and powers and secrets that this involves. Her boarding school teachers are outraged that she returns at night in the early hours, but her mother is her ally here, allowing her to grow up fast, so that she is released from being another burden to this incredibly weak mother.
She learns the power of being the desired one and she learns desire. Here desire growns with her emotional experience. He totally indulges his role as the one totally lost in love for the cooler, more detached partner, suffering because his love is not totally matched, and desiring her to the point of obsession.
This book is a wonderful dreamlike reflection on the awakening of love and all its powers (in her) and the exquisite pain of sexual obsession and becoming lost in the beloved (in him). I recommend the book and invite the reader to approach the text as if reviewing memories and dreams and reflections, allow the emotions to make sense of the book, don't try to make it chornologically fit together, since like your own past, it is a scattering of passions and sensations.