Customer Reviews

The Lover

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

I read this book in one day. This was my first introduction to Duras. What an incredible story! Her writing is like poetry, like a song, filled with lyrical descriptions of her surroundings as well as her feelings, filled with gorgeous imagery and constant forshadowing towards the demise of her own family.

The story itself would be totally unacceptable by today's (or the entire 20th century's) standards, being that of an illicit love affair, set in prewar Indochina (today's Vietnam) between a 15-year-old French girl and a 27-year-old Chinese son of a millionaire. However, it is what it is, it happened, and the way the story is told is beautiful and impassioned.

What's most amazing here is the evolution of the girl's psyche. In many ways, she was obviously mature way beyond her years, fatalistic and dark, all brought on by the loneliness and frustration of life with her mother and brothers. At the same time, she was naive in the sense that she thought she was strong enough to handle this affair without falling in love. The girl tried to convince herself that money was the only objective in this affair (when in fact, money was the only reason why her mother(!) allowed her to continue see her lover--ouch!).

Duras' writing reminds me of that of Maxine Hong Kingston's (or is it vice versa?). Many thoughts are repeated throughout the pages, like refrains or choruses. She switches the narrative from first to third person. She switches time frames from past to present and back again. It's as if the whole novel was written completely stream-of-consciousness, or possibly a parallel to the unpredictable horrors of her own mother's madness.

The young girl grew up in a sad, unloving and erratic home, with an unstable mother, whose unhealthy allegience to her devious and abusive older brother created an almost intolerable environment for the author and her younger brother. Additionally, the time frame was such that a relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man, (let's face it: An adolescent and a grown man) was completely reprehensible. In the face of all these obstacles, it was clear that the author sought refuge with this young man, and that for her, this first taste of sexual passion would be the standard in which all of her future loves would be measured. She never sugar-coated the various facets to this affair, the degrading moments, the moments where the love and passion was so infinite, or when the roles of power and possession were reversed from time to time. Yet, it's clear that this affair, which lasted a year-and-a-half, was very deep and meaningful to both parties, a tragic and impossible love that would haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

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.

Marguerite Duras has written, in retrospect, the hypnotic story of her odd relationship with the adult son of a Chinese millionnaire at least 15 yrs her senior. Written as a novel, there's no doubt it's Duras' own tale of her love affair when she was just a 15yo in Indochina in the 30s, one of three children of a disturbed and impoverished English widow who was trying to make ends meet as a teacher. Her daughter, Duras, was left mostly to fend for herself at a boarding school that was unusually permissive with the odd comings and goings of this precocious child-woman.
Duras tells this story from the distance of years, through a technique of oblique references, forgettings, reiteration, repetition (the straw hat, the dress, the shoes...), fractured images, and readers get the sense of coming at what happened reluctantly, as tho the author is a little unwilling to share everything with us.
It's a mesmerizing, seductive, atmospheric, overlapping, strangely detached story - one that readers will not soon forget.

I first saw the movie which was based on this book. I absolutely adored the movie and I couldn't wait to read the book. This book is one of the best books I ever read (and I read a lot). It's absolutely amazing. The story is about a fifteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a wealthy twenty-nine-year-old China man in 1930's Indochina. But the greatness of this book doesn't come from the story line, it lays in the way Marguerite Duras tells the story. From the first page you can feel that this is her story. Her prose is so poetic and hauntig, somewhat obsessive. This book is so intimate and personal. It felt like Marguerite was sitting right across me and telling me the story of her first real love and ... experience. But the relationship between her and China man is not like a normal relationship between two people in love. At one point her lover gives her the money for sleeping with him. There is also an interesting relationship between Marguerite and her best friend, a beautiful girl named Helen Lagonelle. There is even a passage when the two kiss and when Marguerite finds out she's going back to France, she offers her lover to take Helen so he could forget her easier. This book is unforgettable. It's fantastic, hauntig and somewhat dark. It explores the human passion. I had an opportunity to read this book in french (the original)and I never knew before that french can be so beautiful. In short, this book is more than perfect and I recommend it to everyone who is looking for some twisted and unforgettable true story.

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.]

The Lover is, first and formost, a tragedy of two lovers destined to part. Marguerite Duras has created a world in which love, in many forms, is still found (if only briefly) in the face of ever-present impossibilty. While arguably semi-autobiographical, the real charm of this book is its grittiness and willingness to present a world in which people can and do make choices that they know will only lead to ruin and disappointment, and still live with the consequences.

Duras' narrator, an unnamed woman reflecting back on her coming of age in Saigon, shares her life in a frank yet touching way. The depth of thought and feeling the character portrays lends a sense of reality. Does she love the man from Chalong? Is this just prostitution? Is she driven by poverty and desperation, or is she seeking an escape from the horrors at home? I suspect even Duras was unsure, and this fallability of her narrator is what makes her so real and engaging.

The passion of the lovers, featured so prominently in the erotic loves scenes of the film adaptation, are far more subtle in the novel. There are no cheap thrills here, and those looking for wild descriptions of who does what to whom are bound to be disappointed. This is no Harliquin romance. Perhaps the most sexually explicit description is not of the heroine's time with the man from Cholong but of her fantasies about her friend Helen. These fantasies inform us of the nature of her sexual relationship with her Chinese lover more than any other memory. they also highlight the young girl's search for compassion and love that has been missing from her life to this point.

The life of Duras' lovers offers an interesting allegory to the decline of the French Indochinoise colonies. Its clear that the best days of the empire have past, the power of the 'natives' and the Chinese in Saigon is increasing, and the Second World War looms large on the horizon. Like Duras' young girl, the French relationship with 'exotic' Asia is doomed to failure. The descriptions of Cholong, the Mekong Delta and Cambodia are clear and recognizable even to modern visitors, and will surely interest those who have been there themselves.

Some readers may be disappointed that there is no happy ending for this book. Love stories are most often about hope. These lovers, however, have other things to share with us. This is a wonderful book and a refreshingly honest portrayal of love.

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!

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.

The Lover is DROP DEAD GORGEAUS. This novel is an emotional masterpiece that is a true story. The North China Lover is another book by Marguerite Duras and is also based on that ravishing affair. There was a dazzling motion picture of this novel that is masterful and I have never seen a film in my life that adapted a novel so well because in the exact same words and what the characters did were just outstanding on the silver screen. In the film the characters were the young Marguerite profoundly played by Jane March (who looks exactly like Marguerite Duras) and the man from cholon china passionately played by Tony Leung. The Lover is the best book ever, The best film ever, and the best soundtrack ever by Gabriel Yared which is beautiful and is outstanding for the book and the movie. This SUPERIOR MASTERPIECE by Marguerite Duras is about the intense,the passionate,the unforgettable, the haunting,and deeply forbidden affair between a poor fifteen year old french girl with serious problems back at her home in Sadec Vietnam and a wealthy engaged older chinese man in prewar Indochina. Duras' writing is so deep she paints the pictures of the intense, perfectly (and passionately) explicit and torridly scandelous experiances of the real lovers that are like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. This is a stunningly touching achievement that captures and embraces the incredible essence in sexual awakening,human love, and the deepest passion we all have inside. The Lover is like our deepest most intense fantasy put into words and it makes you feel much better because this happened. Anyone who is looking for a deeply erotic, melodramatic,amazing,sensously mesmerizing, and gripping story of mature love and sensual desire combined with continuously over the top erotica it will surely blow you away. I completely reccomend this breathtaking masterpiece.