Desire. Is it pleasure or pain? Can and should we try to control it? To trust it? To understand it? Do we shape our desires or do they shape us? What part of us is desire? Is it the purest and deepest aspect of human nature? Where does it come from? Can a desire on its own be vile or virtuous or only actions are bound to be judged? How much do we know about our desires and where do they lead us? What brings two people together? What brings together a French girl and Chinese man twelve years older than her? Set in the 1930s in Indochina, this is a tale about two people trying to break their bonds, but unable to do so. They are kindred spirits in more ways than one. They are both oppressed by their families, they are both unable to understand their feelings. They lose themselves in passion that is born from more than romance. It is a passion for change, for freedom. But can there be truly freedom in desire? Is desire bound to enslave us or free us? Buddhists believe that desire is the reason for all human suffering and only liberation of desire may lead to ultimate happiness. But along with pain can we also find pleasure in unfulfilled desires? Is all longing pain and dissatisfaction? Can it be an inspiration, a fuel? Don’t those of us focusing only on present pleasures close the doors for achieving greater ones? Should we give up the possibility for more in order to fully enjoy what we have now or should we sacrifice some of that bliss for the hope of a bigger one? Longing brings pain and emptiness with itself, but it also makes the good part even better. Which is better? An ordinary, calm, perfect happiness or happiness stained by the pain which comes with longing, but also enriched by the intensity and passion that come along with it? The former sounds better if we accept that happiness is just a lack of pain. But Is it just that? In “Notes from the Underground” it is explored the idea of finding pleasure in pain. People don’t just desire what they cannot have. They also desire what ultimately can never bring them happiness. Often the greatest joys and sorrows are consequences of each other. This is a story of doomed lovers, who love each other with all the intensity and passion of people who know they are about to lose each other. "He didn’t speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he’d close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he’d loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me.". Do we treasure the most that which we are bound to lose? Do we sometimes risk to lose it in order to feel it more intensely? If we always want more, does that make us adventurers, masochists, seekers of wisdom…or maybe just people? Desire can built us or ruin us. Sometimes is does both. If desire is pleasure and pain equally, how do we cope? How do the protagonists do it? She admits her feelings only in the end, when she has already lost him. Maybe because she was afraid that loving him would make the loss all the more painful? But it would have made the anterior pleasure all the greater and wouldn’t those precious moments, her getting everything she can out of them, eventually be a consolation as well? Maybe this is why he loves pain. It is pain born out of feeling which he savours at its wholesome. Do we dare to be adventurous and desire or are we determined to treasure that which we already have? Dreams of the future can both enrich and rob us of our present. It is all about balance. We should always look with hope for the future and dream, but not in a way that makes us forget the value of that which we have now. We should always remember the value of what we already have, but we should also always remember to dream. Hadn’t great artists and adventurers dreamed and desired, we wouldn’t have had everything we have today. Worlds are built on dreams and desires.

Read count: 1

4.5

Je suis exténuée de désir.

I am worn out with desire.

It is extremely and refreshingly satisfying to read a book in its original language and appreciate the unblemished and literal words penned by the author.

Très vite dans ma vie il a été trop tard.

Very early in my life it was too late.

This haunting, sensual, melancholic, dreamlike and poetic autobiographical novel is about a forbidden love affair between a teenager, who is narrating the story and a man 12 years her senior.

Il la regarde. Les yeux fermés il la regarde encore. Il respire son visage. Il respire l’enfant, les yeux fermés il respire sa respiration, cet air chaud qui ressort d’elle. Il discerne de moins en moins clairement les limites de ce corps, celui-ci n’est pas comme les autres, il n’est pas fini, dans la chambre il grandit encore, il est encore sans formes arrêtées, à tout instant en train de se faire, il n’est pas seulement là où il le voit, il est ailleurs aussi, il s’étend au-delà de la vue, vers le jeu, la mort, il est souple, il part tout entier dans la jouissance comme s’il était grand, en âge, il est sans malice, d’une intelligence effrayante.

He looks at her. Goes on looking at her, his eyes shut. He inhales her face, breathes it in. He breathes her in, the child, his eyes shut he breathes in her breath, the warm air coming out of her. Less and less clearly can he make out the limits of this body, it’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it’s still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there, where it’s visible but elsewhere too, stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it’s nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult, it’s without guile, and it’s frighteningly intelligent.

Saigon, 1929.
She is a 15 year old French girl, from an impoverished family; he is a wealthy 27 year old Chinese man.
She is over-confident, mature, moody and desperate to escape a life of poverty.
He is weak, afraid, sentimental and easily intimidated by his domineering father.
Will their illicit love affair survive under the merciless social conditions?
Does love even exist in their affair or is it more of an infatuation or their need to satisfy the desire of the flesh?

Elle a dû rester longtemps la souveraine de son désir, la référence personnelle à l’émotion, à l’immensité de la tendresse, à la sombre et terrible profondeur charnelle.

For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh.

I'm unclear on why this little novel was given the title The Lover.

Why the Lover?

This story has barely anything to do with him.

Who it is about: the young woman, the old woman, the girl who had the lover.

This distinction is important: the unnamed protagonist's age and status are perpetually changing and not in any particular order.

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.

This is a story told in a stream-of-consciousness. . . completely non-linear, no distinguished dialogue, either.

And, a far more appropriate title for it would be: Surrounded by Sociopaths.

This would be a fantastic book for psychologists to read; it's a multi-generational account of a parent with a mental illness raising children who then suffer from untreated attachment disorders.

I'm no psychologist; I'm always in this reading and writing business for the characters and the stories, but I can't help but be fascinated by these people.

Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply it's impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don't even look at one another.

This isn't the Partridge family, folks, and your family of origin will most likely look a lot better, in comparison.

Oh, and in case you're like me and you picked up this book hoping for some guilt-free, pandemic sex:

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. (I'm laughing at you and me).

Don't let the title and/or the bizarre three pages of a completely out of context, girl-on-girl fantasy segment mislead you.

Ain't nothing sexy about a girl suffering from attachment disorder who avoids her brother so he won't rape her staring up blankly at the ceiling while her “lover” must make love to fight against fear.

Ugh! Why must fictional sex be as complicated as real sex??

But (and this may surprise you, given some of my gripes), the writing was fascinating. Fascinating. I have post-it notes all over my copy. Marguerite Duras was a trendsetter and a poet. This is a bold work of “semi-autobiographical” fiction filled with inspired images and memorable lines.

In fact, the last line made me bite down so hard on my finger, hot tears spilled out of the corners of my eyes.

Ms. Duras wasn't just playing.

the prose of this book is so particular because of its disjointed nature : you usually have to reread some paragraphs twice simply to get their meaning and to figure out who the author is talking about

Γαλλική Ινδοκίνα της δεκαετίας του 1930, με φόντο την μνημειώδη
αυτόπεριφρόνηση του ηδονικού έρωτα,
τη μάσκα επαναστατικής δράσης ενάντια στην προκατάληψη για την έγχρωμη αγάπη,
την οικεία αφηγηματική φύση της πρωταγωνίστριας, αυτή, που χαρακτηρίζεται απο την προκλητική
και άνετη περηφάνεια της κατάντιας της
και την απενοχοποιημένη συναισθηματική νοημοσύνη των ηρώων.
Όλα προγραμματισμένα με έναν σκανδαλώδη, χειριστικό τρόπο προς τον αναγνώστη,
σε αυτόν, που η ιστορία καταφέρνει
να τον περάσει αμέσως στους βαθύτερους μονολόγους.

Αυτούς,που τα βράδια προσπαθούν να σκοτώσουν
τις αισθήσεις έντασης και παρέκκλισης,
απο τα μυστικά που κρατάει η ψυχή απο την καρδιά,
ενώ η ζωή της νύχτας των διαλόγων,
ανάμεσα σε λαχανιασμένες αναπνοές και λυγμούς πάθους,
χτυπάει με ένα θυσιασμένο θράσος τις πόρτες της συνείδησης και ζητάει,
υπέροχα σφάλματα,
για να μην πεθάνει απο την πείνα των ηθών και των παραδόσεων.
Κάτι τέτοιες έννοιες πωλούνται πανάκριβα
στα παζάρια των απολιθωμένων αποικιοκρατιών και όποιος δεν καταφέρει να χαρίσει
και να δεχτεί κραυγές ανείπωτης ευδαιμονίας,
ζωντανές και άγριες ,
πεθαίνει απο σπασμένη καρδιά
στο απαρτχάιντ των αρθρωτών υποβιβασμών και την αόριστη έκλειψη του «εραστή»που πάντα θα καταδικάζεται.
Πάντα θα απαγορεύεται να αγαπήσει πέρα απο τον φόβο, πέρα απο την κυριαρχία της αρνητικότητας
και δεν θα φοβάται να πεθάνει,
αφού και ως ζωντανός βίωνε την καθημερινότητα
του κενού, του άδειου πυρήνα της ψυχής
που έχει ήδη πετάξει μακριά, διότι δεν άντεξε το χάος της επιβολής των οικογενειακών σχεδίων για τα εγκλήματα που καθόριζαν άπειρες ανεραστες γενιές.

Πόσο υπέροχο, βαθιά σιωπηρό μέσα στο συναισθηματικό αντίλαλο και πολυπλοκότατο στυλ γραφής.
για μια διττή ιστορία πάθους και μια παράδοξη αμηχανία φιλοσοφίας ανάμεσα στο ακατέργαστο μίσος,
τη ζωή και τον θάνατο.
Είναι ένα ερωτικό αριστούργημα διαπολιτισμικού ρομαντισμού μέσα σε γκρίζες κοινωνίες
και ανάμεσα σε οικογένειες πέτρινες, απολιθωμένες, σιωπηλές απο την μανία της κατάθλιψης και την αδιαπέραστη ανάγκη του εσωτερικού μονολόγου,
αυτού, που μας αποκαλύπτει πως η σιωπή χρησιμοποιείται απο την οικογένεια
της ηρωίδας-αφηγήτριας ως όπλο για να σκοτώσει ο ένας τον άλλον.

Βαθιά αδιαπέραστη η δύναμη της καταχρηστικής συγγένειας, δέχεται και αφορίζει την απαγορευμένη αγάπη ανάμεσα στην δική τους
15χρονη Γαλλίδα και τον νεαρό Κινέζο εραστή,
γόνο ενός εκατομμυριούχου,
άθραυστου και απαρέγκλιτα συμμορφωμένου στις υποδείξεις της εθνικής του παράδοσης.

Η Duras με αξιοθαύμαστη μαεστρία καταφέρνει μέσα απο τα μακρινά, πέτρινα, απολιθωμένα και αδιαπέραστα κομμάτια της ιστορίας να εφαρμόσει την σιωπή ως τρόπο έκφρασης του συναισθήματος.

Την αγάπησα. Γι αυτό και μόνο.

✨✨✨✨✨✨

Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.

The book is like being trapped inside a deep and disturbing dream on a stifling hot summer night. A dream steeped in melancholy and half memories and you wake up choking. Is it Duras' writing style or the translation that creates the sparse atmosphere, the jumping around from present to memory to thoughts to...I'm not sure exactly what. But it worked so beautifully, so tragically.

Early in the book Duras writes about her mother in a way that did something to me. I found myself tearing up, my heart beating a little faster. I put the book aside, picked it up again, re-read, left the room, came back. This book unsettled me. It haunted me. If you've lost your mother, if you never had a relationship with her, if she was troubled or cold or failed to love you....the first thirty pages of this book will slay you.

And then we meet the lover. And his hands. And his mouth.

You need pauses to breathe during this book. It plows into your gut and you're there, right there, in the jungle, in the heat, in the darkness and you can barely see through the fog. You can just make out the shadows and shapes of the story but you're never entirely sure what's going on. You feel the lover's breath on your flesh and you should be squirming, because this is after all another Lolita, but you're not squirming. You're not. You're hypnotised and depressed and lost and, just like the narrative, you're broken into pieces.

“

I finally finished Marguerite Duras' "The Lover." Why did it take me this long to read a 117-page novel? (I posted it on my currently-reading shelf on Feb. 25th). [HINT: It is not because I didn't want it to end.]

Was it the nature of the writing: random, unconnected musings by une femme d'un certain age of her colonial adolescence? Was it the frustrating way she shifted subjects, time, and place at will? Maybe it is the movie-lover in me (I don't want to reveal too much about myself (foreignfilmguy.blogspot.com). But I kept thinking this novel would work better as a screenplay, a la Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" (about a French woman's affair with an Asian man). Then I remembered: that was also written by Mme. Duras!

As a film, the story sharpens its focus on the two lovers, while dispensing with the 'crazy mother' subplot that much too often interrupts the flow of the narrative. In short: the movie was better.

Who is “L’amant”(*)? The characters in this story are nameless. A puzzle of personal pronouns draws an anonymous canvas that perspires with alienation and the dense humidity of a foreign land, that mourns the loss of youth and innocence, that invokes the image of photographs never taken, the sound of words never uttered and the mirage of a future that never existed. Only the condensed ardour that clouds up the windows of a small hotel room, where two slippery bodies abandon themselves to contorting passion, defies reality and the passage of time.

But who is “The Lover”?
Is “The Lover” the fifteen-years-old tomboy standing in front to the ferry hiding her prematurely wrinkled face under the shadow of a man’s fedora hat?
She never expected to fall in love with him. She was only worn out with desire. And her dysfunctional family of European colonizers needed the money.
Is “The Lover” the wealthy Chinese man of twenty-seven years of age from Cholen who adores the girl from the distance, concealed behind the tainted windows of his father’s black limousine?
He undresses her with trembling fingers and weeps in the exile of his illegitimate love. He is ashamed of his weakness. She kisses his fragility and ruins the rest of his life.

At first I thought “The Lover” was she.
Then I realized it was he.
And finally I understood it was much more.

“The Lover” is a movable portrait of a first person narrator who is visiting a succession of her younger selves. Memories are her brushstrokes and life-consuming longing the color in which she paints her pictorial story. The awakening of first love and the discovery of erotic pleasure arrive hand in hand with the heartbreak of a certain separation, the sentence to life imprisonment by familial duty and the ruthlessness of intransigent tradition. The cultural distance between the local people and the colonizers in French Indochina become the backdrop of a love story that is condemned by history before it even started and the detached irony that drips from the narrator’s voice can’t disguise the desolation that is eating her alive underneath a carefully studied, impassive poise.

“The Lover” is a cascade of musical notes delivered in fluid movements, a whirlwind of words repeated like a mantra in breathless cadence and staccatto punctuation . “The Lover” is more than a semi autobiographical memoir and less than an interior monologue. It is the rawness of impressionistic paragraphs capturing in Polaroid snapshots the obsession of a crazed mother, the chauvinistic abuse of an elder brother and the alternating urgency and resigned languidness that leaves a permanent scar on the features of a young woman.

Yes. The tale has been told countless times before.
But never like this.
Never the vessel set sail in the Mekong River amidst deafening heat, chirping jungles and melting sky annihilatating all color.
Never the salty tears drowned the sob in torrents of silence and immobility while Chopin’s notes tinted the breath of the wind onboard.
Never the throbbing heartbreak was replaced by incandescent prose that palpitated to the rhythm of the distant voice of China.
Never the fate of two lovers who never spoke to each other, would be sealed with only two words.

(*) I read Marguerite Duras’ novella in Catalan translated from the French by Marta Pessarrodona.

I think I'm beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I've never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.

***

And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she'd been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in turn, throw herself in turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.

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.

And the time comes, when we’ve to make peace with our past, to let go of moments we cherished dearly, or of those which brought torment endless, the love we lived or the one we denied emphatically, the people we admired foolishly and the ones we’d to abandon, things fall apart and what is left are the crumbled spikes we call memories. And time comes, when those fragmented pieces of the past are to be jotted down, the unspoken tale to be spoken after all, to let out the stories inside us, not to seek a sympathetic heart or to moan over our losses, we say our hearts just for the sake of saying, to breathe freely, to be at peace. Here is the tale told in most apathetic fashion, touching the innermost chords of the flesh in us which beats with the same rhythm as of the indifferent narrator, after all we’ve all been the lovers and we’ve loved “A love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime…never.”
There’s nothing new in the tale, if you’re looking for a love story you’re gravely mistaken. There’s no such love nor the story. The kind of love that starts with dewy glances and perturbs hearts, the kind of love with the happy ending of togetherness, or the kind of love that longs for the beloved in dark nights with juices flowing down the loins, marguerite pens down events from her childhood in most detached of voices, hers is not the lush style with poetic diction, there’s a marked dispassion in the tone and daunting flair in descriptions of her Indochina which is Vietnam today, and of her Chinese lover, a man of twenty-seven besotted by the skinny French girl of fifteen who hides her poverty-stricken face under a Manish hat, who wears clothes that were in fashion a dozen years ago, who has a body of a child and no flesh to attract men but a face of a half goddess and half prostitute, veiled behind his limousine glass, the lover falls for her in a fair morning in his way to cholon, he can never marry her ,he tells the child every time he makes love to her, this stripped naked reality saddens the most erotic of scenes too.
Like a father he tends to her needs, like a lover he worships her passionately, as for her, she’s found a haven in him, a home away from home, from those desperately poor people that are her family, the child loves his skin as he loves her untainted soul, they never promise nothing, they weave no future, as the lovers know, they have none. Sometimes we just want to lie next to someone and sleep, knowing our hearts are safe, the surety of sharing the same sky appeases much, as duras penned it down in her 70s, her heart must’ve been swelled with the thought of her lover, the faded face, the gone fragrance, the screaming silence, of her war-ravaged Saigon:

I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.
He will always feel the same for her, he said..