The Lover by Marguerite Duras Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Lover
Book Review: Spare, Free-Floating
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Lover" is a brief account of a poor 15½-year-old French girl's mismatched relationship with a wealthy older Chinese man. The story takes place in Southeast Asia during the 1930s. The two lovers meet on a ferry boat crossing the Mekong River. He offers to drive her to her boarding school in Saigon; she accepts; and their troubled affair follows shortly after, pitted with social obstacles over race, class, and age.The book is very sparely written with just over 100 pages and virtually no dialogue. The story jumps around quite a bit too. On one page, the young narrator will be describing the future of her family; in the next, she will be reminiscing over her Chinese lover. Her writing style is best suited for readers who like short, free-floating stories.
I read "The Lover" in my sophomore year of high school, and it's still one of my favorite books. I saw the movie several years later, and that too has become one of my favorites. I highly recommend watching it after reading the book. It's absolutely beautiful.
Book Review: Sumptuous story
Summary: 5 Stars
The prose is stark at times, making this classic all the more intriguing. The narrator seems at once affected and numb, young but not naive. It is said to be a slice of the actual author's life, and certainly it seems to have been written from a place of truth and pain. The movie differs greatly from the book and is enjoyable as its own entity, but if you liked the film, read the original -- much more affecting.Book Review: 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: The Lover
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved the film version of this book. I had not read the book at that time. This book is wonderful, erotic, sensual and so real to the time and place. Be prepared for a wonderful journey.Book Review: This is a book for those who have a unrequited love
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this book. It's not written from the movie THE LOVER 1992 but from the author's own view of her life in Indochina as a young teen and her family and her Chinese lover. It's a beautiful love story but sad in the end. If you have a love who you could not be with in life, then you could relate to this book. It's also great to watch the movie THE LOVER which the movie was based on. Not for children or young teen because of subject matter.