The Lover

This was a difficult book to read. It was stream of consciousness, which I detest, but it was written somewhat well in that I was interested in continuing to see how the elder brother murdered the younger one. (Spoiler, you never find out. It’s just an accusation from the narrator/sister.)

This is semi-autobiographical and from the daughter/sister’s POV, so it’s hard to tell if all of the people in this had mental health issues, were just generally unlikeable or if it is just the narrator who has mental health issues and is unlikeable. Either way, they were all pretty horrible and pathetic in their own way.

They all treated the Chinese lover horribly, BUT he was stoicking a 15 year old when he was 27, SO he probably deserved worse than he got. Though the 15 year old seems to have gone into it whole-heartedly for the money, but if she didn’t need it, would she have done it so “willingly”? Also, no talk of contraception being used. I suppose at that time they didn’t have much in the way of that, but didn’t either of them think that they could get in a bad way? And he had other lovers before her, disease was also a risk. I guess 15 year olds who are pimping themselves to feed their family have other things to worry about. Very sad.

All in all, including the intro, a completely horrible book. I didn’t get much of a feel for the setting/location and it seems that as soon as there was a glimmer of real feeling or a beautiful turn of phrase, it was immediately ruined by a time jump that made NO sense at all. It’s like she was purposefully trying to ruin her own book.

The language is overly florid and overblown, but ironically doesn’t convey any emotion to the reader. Everything is repeated, dulling the meaning to Charlie Brown teacher’s “Wah wah wah wah wah wah.”

So time and place? Not well described. Characters? All unlikeable. Tone? Bland and depressing. Writing style? Stream of consciousness, which is a style I loathe. Might work for you, but it just turns me off. Doesn’t help that there are no quotation marks, though it was usually clear to me who was speaking and what they said, rather than thought. And holy over-comma use Batman! One whole paragraph was ONE sentence, with commas liberally sprinkled throughout. No thank you!

It clocked in at 117 pages, but felt like it took forever to get through and it ends clearly, but on a downer. How like life! Very French I would hazard to say.

The more I write about it, the more this is going towards 1 star. I can’t think of one redeeming thing in it. A waste of my time to read and paper, not even enough to use as TP if we run out. This may be your bag, but it didn’t do much for me. Not recommended.

<3 "

i found myself utterly muted by this book, which is problematic because the book club meets this friday, and they aren't going to be so dazzled by my bruschetta that i can get away with just hiding behind the tiny jewess and drinking their wine. so i have to think of something.

consulting the "reading group handbook" by rachel w. jacobsohn, bought for my final school assignment, i learn how to think about literature:

characters and story line: young french girl, older chinese man falling into bed and clinical love without names in indochina.

character's actions: she has poor unsatisfying home life, he has rich traditional home life. they bang. everything seems muffled by gauze.

reader's emotional response: unmoved. if the author's voice is going to be so removed, and the characters aren't going to feel anything particularly deep, why should i be expected to have emotions? it's like watching people fucking with a wall in between them, masturbating at each other. resentfully.

narrative: fragmentary, past/present conflation, surface-emotions only. short, poetic musings which are occasionally quite lyrical, but never caught at me.

oh, man, i have zero to say about it. i don't know - people love this book, but i am not one of them. wish me luck.

readers, thinkers and drinkers jan 2010.

come to my blog!

Such a pungent, beautifully written, autobiographical book!
About what is wasted in life (or about wasted lives), about the absence of love, about the need to find this love in anything, in anyone.
Way beyond an erotic novel! - erotism here is just a fragment of this young girl’s life, just as real as her shame, sadness, loneliness, strenght.
A must read book!

Despite its title, The Lover is not a love story. Like Nabokov's Lolita, older men take advantage of underage girls, pretending as though these "sexual arrangements" (i.e. rape in Lolita and statutory rape in The Lover) are born out of pure affection and mutual respect.

But whereas Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's confessional protagonist, who tries to win over his audience from his jail cell, painting himself as the image of a "hopeless romantic" with an incurable illness, Marguerite Duras chooses to tell the narrative from the point of view of the young protagonist, a 15-year-old girl with a dysfunctional family and lower-class background.

In Lolita, the voice of Dolores Haze is effectively strangled by Humbert's narration. We don't get to hear her side of the story. We don't even get to know her as a real person. Lolita is the name that Humbert bestows upon her, it is a manifestation of Humbert's fantasy in which Dolores becomes the sole object of his desire, she is no longer a subject. Dolores becomes Lolita, the "nymph", whose sole purpose it is to satisfy Humbert's twisted fantasy of her. Who this 12-year-old girl really is? The readers will never know.

And whilst Duras refuses to giver her 15-year-old protagonist a name, we nonetheless get her side of the story, and only hers. We learn of her dysfunctional family, of her 27-year-old "lover", the son of prominent Chinese businessman. The "lover" mimics Humbert’s obsessive attachment to his nameless paramour. However, Duras strips their relationship of any romantic pretense, a means that is achieved by having the narrative be told in retrospect, the language the older protagonist uses when looking back on her youth is stripped from false romance and is often tainted with regret.

n  The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.n

Throughout the narrative, which refuses to acknowledge traditional chronology and instead goes back and forth between the protagonist's present as a famous French writer and her childhood and youth in French Indochina, we catch glimpses at the young girl's harsh realities. The sudden death of her father impacted her family not only emotionally but financially, as they had to survive without him in Indochina. Consequently, the girl's mother – "she was desperate with despair" – owes numerous debts and often loses herself in the blackout despair of her manic depression. The girl also lives in constant fear of her brothers. Her older brother is violent, aggressive, selfish and vagrant and terrorises the whole family; her younger brother is his prime victim, a fact that distresses the girl greatly: "I tell him my elder brother's cold, insulting violence is there whatever happens to us, whatever comes our way. His first impulse is always to kill, to wipe out, to hold sway over life, to scorn, to hunt, to make suffer."

It is out of this complicated and harrowing family situation that the girl seeks and stays in the unconventional relationship to her rich and older "lover". Out of financial necessity and fear, she seeks stability through him. But when her "lover" takes her family out to dinner at fancy restaurants, it's nothing more but a painful and shame-inducing transaction. Her family will barely speak, let alone look at her lover, resenting the fact that they have to depend on a Chinese man for food, but not proud enough to refuse. The narrator reflects: "When it concerns my lover I’m powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expressions of someone who stares into space."

Critics have often labeled The Lover as an erotic novel, but to me, the erotic or romantic "relationship" serves only as the backdrop to a larger, overarching theme: the loss of childhood for the disillusion of rushed adulthood. The girl is constantly on the defense with her unpredictable mother, who has no faith in her. The girl confesses to her lover, "Today I tell him it's a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life." Dolores and Charlotte, the bickering mother and daughter in Lolita, share a similarly broken relationship. However, Nabokov denies Dolores the chance to ever grow up. Dolores death in childbirth at age seventeen, always defined by the possession of a man.

Duras discards the male gaze in her narrative. Her unnamed protagonist gets to grow up. She is not victimized or infantilized. It's no surprise that the girl hopes to be a writer when she grows up. o write is to make sense of the world, to carve a place for oneself, to affirm the importance and relevance of one's existence. Unlike Dolores Haze, this nameless girl gets the opportunity to fight for autonomy. There's still an obvious power imbalance between the girl and her lover, but she is less a tricked hostage, whisked away for an endless road trip that would be every girl's worst nightmare. Romantic love is not the end goal, even though the girl seeks relief from her isolation and loneliness in her "relationship", her end goal is emancipation through the pursuit of physical connection.

In the introduction of the English translation, Maxine Hong Kingston writes: "The girl and her mother and brothers are barbarians, sans culture. How to enroot oneself but to make primitive, sexual connection with another?" Tired of being rootless, the girl finds a temporary home in a stranger who is just as lost, barely afloat.

Even though the events Duras describes revolve around highly sensitive topics (such as emotional and physical abuse, racism in the French colonies, and issues of consent in relationships involving teenagers and adults), she is not afraid to be honest with her readers. There is no romanticizing of her colonial childhood nor of the trauma that she carried until her death. Nonetheless, The Lover is highly poetic and Duras a lyrical writer. Through her words, she manages to transport her readers to a world that no longer exists, a world of Indochinese landscapes and people she saw abound. If you let it, The Lover will take a hold of you, and it won't let go.

I loved the strangeness of this woman's interior, her voice, the way such a slim volume can sum up an entire life, compelling and erotic and intellectual all at once.
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rereading... it's like craving a certain great dish and you know just who has it on the menu.

Such assurance. I like the way Duras handles the point of view. It begins with an older voice, a woman looking back at her life, a particular moment of her life, and she uses the past tense, whereas when she is in the past, in the point of view of the girl she was, she uses the present tense. The kind of thing a writer gets a kick out of...

I'd forgotten the way it opens, as the older woman thinks of her face, the ruined face which was already hers at 18, after the events which will unfold in the book. So much packed in to each small paragraph-long section, the resonance of each detail, the mystery of it.

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Such a short book, but a packs an amazing punch. Trying to figure out why.

Odd small digressions about two acquaintances in Paris during the war, years after the events of the book, one of whom who turned out to be a collaborator. Sideways glances at the family drama, the poisonous older brother, the weak younger brother, the ambivalent mother, haunted by poverty, living out her life in the French colony of Indochine... but always oblique.

Certain images burn brightly in my mind. Making love behind shutters in a crowded area of town, the voices of the people so close outside. The black limousine in which the Chinese lover, son of a millionaire, waits for the girl every day. The way the mother washes the house in the country out when she's overwhelmed by her own darkness-- a house built on stilts, it could just be sluiced clean, water poured on the floor in buckets, water pooling around the piano legs... And the girl on the ferry on the Mekong in the man's hat and gold lame shoes, waiting for her life to approach, the way that girls do.

The strength of these discrete images is one reason, but there's something else, something more... I'd have to say it's the way the girl's coldness and matter-of-factness create the story's mystery. The narrator, the older self, has that same tone-- but if she was truly as cold as she presents herself, why would she be going back over this moment in her life, the moment that she became the woman she would be for the rest of her life? What is she searching for?

The only likeable person in the book is the Chinese lover she all but destroys in his infatuation for her--not in an evil way, but just in the tough tough tough way of a young girl who has utterly accepted the world as it was presented to her. Her inability to love--or is it really an inability? Or is it something she cannot allow herself? So fascinating to see a young girl who isn't depicted as heady with romance--just the opposite. Here it's the man who can love, but he is weak, as she sees him, because he lacks cruelty, he is weak but he loves her "unto death." She does desire him, but it's funny that the girl can accept her desire, but insists she does not love him. And she is cruel, because she comes from a cruel family, a cruel colony, a cruel society, both aware of her privilege as a white girl in the East, and her shameful poverty.

What is continually fascinating about this book is that a story of a love affair is rarely told from the point of view of the one who does not love. This girl would usually be the obscure object of desire, not the subject. The mood of doom and exoticism and desire is hard to shake.

My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don't look at him either. They can't. They're incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they'd be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society.

There are a plethora of splendid reviews of The Lover by my GR friends. Read those. My own reactions were of a lower cut, more bruised and bottom shelf. I found the novel to be one of shame. Take the girl and her situation, colonials on the down and out. There is a great deal of local color but, the characters find themselves clinging to the short side of the stick. A great poet once said, "I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home." Their failure is malignant. It clings to their clothes and hazes their spoiled breath. I found the erotic to be negligible as well, a clingy despair in contrast to the angelic breasts of the protagonist's schoolmate. There's a wisdom in that, I suppose, however ephemeral. Duras succeeds in making the reader uncomfortable. The framing dynamic is between the older Chinese man and the fifteeen year old protagnist, wry in her man's hat and gold shoes. That relationship is outflanked by the Naturalisti images Duras weaves of Parisian garrets and the familial failures of dissipation.

My year of reading (mostly French) women continues in pace with a philosophy of the here and now. This was a detour of benefit.

Una novela increíble: dura, real, cercana y luchadora.
Me ha encantado. Duras pasa a ser todo un referente.