The Lover (Paperback)

by Marguerite Duras (Author) "One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me..." (more)
Key Phrases: lame shoes, little white girl, Vinh Long, Betty Fernandez, Helene Lagonelle (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
It is said old loves can haunt us. The Lover creates this feeling through an atmosphere of shadows, veils, floating memories that came from - was it this boat trip or the last one? from age eight or twelve or thirty? In the end it doesn't matter, for the experience is now embedded, a distinct yet inseparable part of the personality. Marguerite Duras mines her own past to tell The Lover, the story of an adolescent girl growing up in Indochina during the 1930s. The girl is wayward, rebellious; one day, returning to school on the ferry, dressed in gold lame shoes, a man's hat and a silk dress, she encounters the son of a Chinese millionaire. Soon they are involved in the first affair of her life, one she claims has no basis in love for her. He can never marry her - his father has refused - and she says she will leave without regrets. But is that possible? Years later she looks back. By presenting ideas and memories in paragraphs that are literally isolated yet constantly overlapping, The Lover creates a misty world of connections made by emotion rather than logic or chronology, a feeling that lingers after the book itself is closed. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
Back in print in paperback, "an exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl" ("Boston Herald"). This edition includes an Introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective--that of a visitor to Vietnam today.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st Pantheon paperback ed edition (September 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375700528
• ISBN-13: 978-0375700521
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #31,866 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Remembering the sexual past, October 23, 2005

By	C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Experimental writing style that works to perfection, March 25, 2004

By	Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Memories elucidated, January 11, 2004

By	Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.