La estructura es un caos. Fragmentos de historia van y vienen entre pasado, presente y futuro. Pero cada párrafo es una experiencia emocional. Sensorial. Me encantaría volver una y mil veces a releerla.

Con Marguerite me pasa algo que no me pasa con muchxs autores. No me importa de qué trata la novela. Solo importa leerla.

n  

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.

n
Gorgeously disturbed and disturbing, fragrant with melancholy and a kind of sepia-tinted nostalgia for lost innocence, youth, love. But while the ostensible eponymous lover is the wealthy Chinese man with whom the barely adult (she's fifteen) narrator has a subversive affair, I can't help feeling that this is more widely concerned with love of a place, a time, a family and - especially - a mother who simultaneously enrages and yet leaves the narrator wanting to know and possess her: 'she makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvellous dream of putting her to death with your own hands'.

Evocations of sex, desire and death collide and repeat themselves and we return obsessively to key moments: the girl on the boat in her silk dress, man's hat and gold lamé shoes, the expensive black limousine, photographs that encode a lost time and people no longer living.

Duras' prose is hallucinogenic, mesmerising and, like other female writers (Jean Rhys comes immediately to mind, also Elizabeth Bowen), she is expert at writing through what isn't said - life and meaning exists in the gaps of the unspoken. The narrator also slips seamlessly between past and present, between 'I' and 'she' as she turns her older, writer's gaze on the girl she once was, making herself both subject and author of the text - a text which balances tentatively somewhere on the spectrum between fiction and notorious biography.

With a light touch, Duras sketches in what it means to grow up female, poor, but a member of a white coloniser race in what was French Indo-China (now Vietnam), and gestures towards all kinds of transgressions related to gender, race, age, even what is and isn't allowed within conventional family feelings.

At only around 120 pages, this is extraordinarily resonant, both beautiful but also troubling for many reasons. What an oversight that so little of Duras' writing has been translated and is in print.

Nota sobre esta edição: Acho que iam caindo os olhos a um senhor (já com alguma idade) quando viu a capa do livro que eu estava a ler, sejamos sinceros, esta capa é bastante ousada.

"O Amante" foi o primeiro livro de Marguerite Duras que li. Pelo que li, percebi que a história deste romance tem muitos paralelismos com a vida da autora, não sendo, no entanto, nítida a fronteira entre a realidade e a ficção.

"Nas histórias dos meus livros que se referem à minha infância, não sei mais o que evitei dizer, o que disse, acho que falei sobre o amor que dedicamos a nossa mãe mas não sei se falei do ódio também e do amor que havia entre nós, e do ódio também, terrível, nessa história comum de ruína e de morte que era a história daquela família, a história do amor como a história do ódio e que foge ainda à minha compreensão, é ainda inacessível para mim, escondida nas profundezas da minha carne, cega como um recém-nascido de um dia. É o limiar onde começa o silêncio. O que acontece é justamente o silêncio, esse lento trabalho de toda a minha vida. Ainda estou lá, na frente daquelas crianças possessas, à mesma distância do mistério. Jamais escrevi, acreditando escrever, jamais amei, acreditando amar, jamais fiz coisa alguma que não fosse esperar diante da porta fechada."

É na Indochina, colónia francesa, que nasce uma relação (talvez paixão) entre uma jovem francesa de 15 anos, pobre e um homem chinês de 27 anos, rico. Esta relação, bastante controversa tanto a nível social como racial, é nos relatada pela autora de uma forma muito íntima, inquieta e sem qualquer pudor.

A escrita não é em nada semelhante ao que leio habitualmente, é directa, com recurso a frases curtas mas é bonita. No início da leitura foi um pouco complicado habituar-me à escrita, aconteceu ter de reler algumas passagens por a leitura não estar a fluir, mas aos poucos fui ficando mais à vontade.

Deixei passar vários dias após ter terminado a leitura e até começar a escrever esta review porque não conseguia perceber ao certo o que sentia acerca desta história. Mesmo após alguns dias de reflexão, ainda não consegui arrumar as ideias mas uma coisa é certa, não percebo como é que só atribuí 3 estrelas ao livro. Durante a leitura não consegui apegar-me às personagens, creio que nem senti qualquer empatia com a jovem, gostei do final mas ainda assim senti que as personagens e a história me eram indiferente. Agora que já passaram duas semanas continuo a precisar de identificar e organizar alguns sentimentos mas na minha cabeça está tudo muito claro. As personagens que pensava não me terem marcado, afinal ficaram na memória, a história ficou e ainda mexe comigo. Será isto um sinal de que Marguerite Duras é uma escrita excepcional?

Apesar de toda esta indefinição, posso afirmar com certeza que este livro é muito mais do que aparenta e também que vou ter de reler "O Amante" daqui a uns tempos.

Opinião no blog:
http://clarocomoaagua.blogs.sapo.pt/o...

Something dark and deeply unsettling simmers angrily beneath the surface of this narrative. This 'something' becomes so potent a force, arousing fear and feelings of disgust in the reader, that one is often tempted to abandon reading and save oneself from all the unpleasantness Duras shoves right in the reader's face without inhibitions.

'The Lover' is a brutally honest attempt at reconciliation with the past, irrespective of how much hurt and damage it may have caused. It is a tale of Marguerite Duras' childhood years spent in what is modern day Vietnam and reads almost like a memoir or piece of non-fiction at times.

The narrator of The Lover is sometimes a young girl of 15, sometimes a woman, sometimes a mere child, sometimes an old lady living in France as an established novelist and sometimes a girl caught in a painful identity crisis. Duras' erratic narration and tendency to flip back and forth between the past and present and her personal contemplations (slightly in a Slaughterhouse-Fiveish way) ensure that the reader occasionally loses the thread connecting all the events. But even so the story resonates strongly with the one reading and and one can barely prevent a disturbing image of human suffering from being burned into their mind.

The unnamed narrator's voice is strangely full of apathy and indifference. It almost lacks a clear character. There are times when the resentment in this young girl reaches a fever pitch and thrashes about restlessly for an outlet into the realm of reality. But in the very next moment, it reduces in intensity and assumes its former state of equanimity. It is as if she is torn between feelings of revulsion and longing and cannot pick one over the other. Her existence itself seems precariously balanced on the predominant emotions of hatred and love that she feels for the people closest to her.

She begins a turbulent love affair with a much older, rich Chinese man and this, in turn, becomes both a boon and a bane for her. He becomes her safe haven from the cruelties of life and the emotional and physical abuse she silently suffers at the hands of her own family members. But then, he also becomes the cause of her social stigma and shame - thus he is her tormentor and her savior at the same time.

n  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.n

Initially it is hinted that the young girl is cold and indifferent towards her lover and possibly does not reciprocate his feelings. But at the end of the affair, she comes to the realization that her love for him may have been genuine after all.

A perpetual state of chaos seems to prevail inside the adolescent protagonist's head and this almost becomes an accurate reflection of the tumultuous times of a colonized, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Indo-China (present Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) - a war-ravaged land whose fortunes remained at the mercy of various colonial masters for decades.

Even though a doomed romance forms the main subject matter of this book, what often overshadows its acutely depressing tones, is the looming presence of Indo-China. Duras' love for this land shines through the haze of her traumatic years.
Because interspersed between the disturbing imagery, there are beautiful descriptions of Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indo-China, bustling with life and activity, the river Mekong and the morning ferry carrying its passengers across to Saigon, where the young girl goes to boarding school.

Thus it is heartening to see that Vietnam is not reduced to the status of a mere backdrop in a tale of personal miseries but comes alive in its state of silent agony, in Duras' sparse but beautiful prose. Its sights and sounds and smells and landscapes become an integral part of this semi autobiographical novella and add a distinct character to it.

n  "The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There's nothing solid separating us from other people. They don't know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim.
Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it's sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest."n

The Lover does not make my list of all-time-favorites and nor may it merit a re-reading. But even then it rightly deserves the 4 stars I awarded it, simply because it succeeds in painting a moving picture of ambivalent relationships, that transcends the boundaries of race or ethnicity and appeals to the universal human spirit.

In questo testo autobiografico l'autrice parla della sua infanzia in Indocina, la sua famiglia e il suo incontro con l'amore.

La famiglia composta solo da lei, dalla madre pazza, dalla fratello maggiore violento e imbroglione, dal minore di lui vittima predestinata.
La miseria e la violenza, l'assenza di amore e i favoritismi.

E poi l'incontro col miliardario cinese, la scoperta del proprio corpo e del suo potere, la relazione clandestina e al tempo stesso sotto gli occhi di tutti.

Sarebbe tutto molto interessante, ma lo stile frammentato, senza ordine né senso, non mi è piaciuto.

" The world should know these things, know that immortality is mortal, that it can die. That it never appears on its own, that it is an absolute duplicity. That it does not exist as a small fact, but only as a principle.
That some may have it in themselves, provided they do not know it. Just as others may discover his presence in them, on the same condition, not to know his power, that life is immortal as long as it is lived. That it is just as wrong to say that's no beginning and no end, or that it begins and ends with the life of the soul, since it belongs to the soul.
Look at the dead sands of the deserts, at the dead bodies of the children : immortality does not pass by here, it stops and bypasses another road. "

A book about the obsession of the face, of the factors that shape the mirrors of our soul :

" At 15, pleasure was imprinted on my face, but I did not know pleasure. "

About the decisions of the soul, and the decisions of nature ( beauty ) - face to face. About the pictures that will never be taken, as well as the lives that we will not relive.
About the lack of courage to live, degrees of purity of despair : " or nothing, or sleep, or death " .
It is a book not only about love, towards the end you think, however, that the lover is not very present. It's about desire, madness, fear, loneliness, about the fact that no one is pitiful, and that - despite appearances - we are all (un)lucky, relative to the absolute. And it is also about the lack of intimacy, or, in other words, about the fact that intimacy needs not space, but time and will.

" Let me tell you something. I am going to pick up the story of " The Lover " - without any literature in it.
The fault I have found with " The Lover " was its literariness, which comes very easily to me, because it's my style ".

İkinci Duras kitabım itibariyle iyice emin oldum ki şayet insan terapi almıyorsa kendisini okumamalı. Allahım bu nasıl sert bir metin; bir insanın nasıl her kelimesine hüzün siner? Bu kadın durmaksızın içimi dağlıyor. Yine kısa, kesik cümleler, anlatmanın anlamsızlığına ikna olmuş ama yine de anlatan, içinden atmak isteyen ve ne kadar anlatsa içindeki umutsuzluğa çare bulamayacağını bilen bir yazarın metni bu. Marguerite Duras’ın dürüstlüğü ve gerçekliği bana zaman zaman Annie Ernaux’yı hatırlatıyor, bu kitapta (belki kişisel hikayesi olduğu için) daha da çok hissettim bunu. Duras’nın 15 yaşındayken Hindiçin’de 27 yaşında bir adamla yaşadığı garip, saplantılı, sarsıcı, tutkulu ve acıklı aşk hikâyesini okuyoruz, bir yandan da yazarın sorunlu ailesine, annesiyle bir türlü kuramadığı ilişkiye ve içinde bulunduğu topluma ne yapsa ait olamayışına bakıyoruz. Söylenecek çok şey var ve söylenecek pek de bir şey yok belki. 90 sayfada içime öküz oturttuğunuz için teşekkürler sayın Duras, ne diyeyim. “Yazdığımı sandım, ama hiç yazmadım, sevdiğimi sandım ama hiç sevmedim, kapalı bir kapı önünde beklemekten başka bir şey yapmadım hiçbir zaman.”

I opened the first page of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, and there she was, the girl with no name with all her ancient reminiscences. I heard her voice as if it were inside my head, Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. How did you get there, my friend? Or should I call you my sister, since from the beginning I discovered we shared anguishes and most certainly a great multitude of passions and dreams?

We both were introduced to this world by tortured mothers, who experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. But their desperation was thoroughly heartfelt, for what can a daughter do when facing a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t make them forget it. We daughters recognize them effortlessly as the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn’t smile. That image of our mothers certainly stayed with both of us for life, my friend. But what can we do, but go on living? I glance outside, and the wind is speeding like my heart is beating, faster and faster, bum, bum, bum, as I get to know you.

But suddenly my mind gets back inside. Yes, I was also there when you met the nameless man while crossing the river going back to Saigon with a storm blowing inside the water. I will never forget how you looked at our first meeting, my friend, wearing a dress of real silk, the famous pair of gold lame high heels and a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon. I have to agree with you, The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. You were only fifteen and a half, but wearing powder to camouflage the freckles and your mother’s lipstick. He was elegant, not a white man but wearing European clothes. Again I remember myself, walking hand in hand with a 26-year-old man when I was just sixteen. Our experiences seem to mimic each other, don’t you think? But while I had two fine sisters, you had two wild brothers that would never do anything.

Going back to your nameless young man, as you told me he got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at you in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to you. He doesn’t smile to begin with. He’s obviously nervous. Was it so easy to get into this man’s car, dear friend? I don’t know if I would have had the courage or the temerity. That’s a clue that even though sisters, we are inherently different. And he presented himself, I was thin and soft and naïve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. I’m sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I met you. And you simply got into his car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seized you, weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there’s a very slight dearness, or fog.

Further memories of those times we shared during one of our meetings, comes running back to me. It is as if I was there with you, peeping into your afternoons. At first he looks at you as though he expects you to speak, but you don’t. He says he loves you madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. You don’t answer. You could say you don’t love him. You say nothing. But you did not stop at that, no, you said, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looked at you in horror, asked, Is that what you want? You said it is. He says he knows already you’ll never love him. Then you let him say it. You were a cool one, weren't you?

I look out the window, and now it’s raining like if it was going to drown us, hiding the sun shining at me. It's dark inside, for nothing could be harder than remembering those times. We who are now almost old ladies, at least well into our mature years. On top of my supposed wisdom, I wonder what is it so mysterious about being a woman. As a matter of fact, I often asked myself that before meeting my first lover at sixteen. Yes, I was some months older than you. Not that it would have made any difference if I could envision what and where that would lead me to. As you said some women just wait, they dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves, dream of romance. long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves. But that was never us; please tell me so. But why could we expect to be different? Did you ever think you might have known, but forgot to tell me? Suddenly inspiration hits me, and I know how we saved ourselves despite our mothers. Do you still remember what you said, some time ago? I think you might have forgotten, let me remind you: it’s so simple, it was the writing that saved us! You told me how it all started,

I want to write. I’ve already told my mother. That’s what I want to do–write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, when you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.

I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She’s jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I’ll be the first to leave.

I also write, although nobody knows, I am not famous after all. But it saved me nonetheless. But you tried to hide it from me. It’s ok; I forgive you, my friend. But I remember so well what you said once, I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

So many years have passed us by, leaving their ignoble scars; but we still reminisce all that went when we were almost children. Yes, you told me I can still see his face, and I do remember the name. The name you forgot to tell me. Indeed, it’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. And your mother, that went on living even after you left her. Let’s leave your brothers and my sisters for another talk, please. Or what you told me happened in Paris. Or my years in London and New York. Let’s leave the rest for another time, for I know with a certainty that goes deep into my bones, that we will meet again. Until then!
__

Notes
1. All quotes are in italics;
2. I took the liberty to change some pronouns to fit the flow of the writing in some quotes; so sometimes it will read 'you' where it was 'her.'

This is what they mean when they say, "lush prose."

I just finished this book. Gorgeous prose, dark content, heartbreaking story. I wonder, how do I rate a book about a 15 and a half year old girl and a 27 year old man? The cringy part of me wants to give a one star, but then I thought about it…

This is the story of Marguerite Duras, almost entirely autobiographical. This is her experience. As much as I felt uncomfortable, it's her story, her experience. It's not a fictional romanticized story of pedophile. It's a real and true experience.

n  n   

Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire.

n  n

The story is told in a complicating way, which made me wonder how the translation from French to English interfered. The young girl (only referred to as 'I' or 15 1/2) is at boarding school when a black shiny car, with a wealthy Chinese man arrives. She's dressed in gold heeled shoes, a fedora, and a dress, dark lipstick. She gets into the car with him and the rest is, not always in detail, an illicit relationship between the two.

This little girl has a childhood void of any emotion. Her abusive older brother is a tyrant, her mother a statue, and her younger brother (the only one she has affection for) too young to understand the ramifications of life.

In this affair, the girl takes money from the man, giving it to her family--who heedlessly devour it. She tells the man she will never love him, but the tides shift, the tenderness with which she's treated has an impenetrable affect on her. A fathers love, never known.

The relationship, doomed from the beginning--age, class, race all swirling above them. In truth, I feel like, while the relationship is wrong--they both seem to connect with suffering. The man, confined to race and wealth, not able to freely love, in a world that judges ever move. The girl, broken and damaged from a family void of emotion. Her older brother, is a monster. The way he hurts, hunts, and damages the family was more sickening than the affair.

While researching 'The Lover,' I learned that Duras wrote it when she was 70 years old. A look back into a time most have forgotten. For many, 15 feels like 14, and 14 feels like 15. The numbers blur together in our teens, but for Duras, it was the most memorable moment, possibly, her entire life.

n  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  n

This isn't a retelling of an illicit affair, its darker, much darker. It's the story of a young girl, coming of age, abandoned to her own devices, navigating a foreign world, without an ounce of support from her family. THAT, is a lot.

n  n   

Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk...It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply its impenetrable... We don't' even look at each other.

n  n

While many will find this novella uncomfortable, it is told from the perspective of one's experience. That, of course, doesn't make it right. Yet, Duras brings her story to light with words that shatter, break apart, and never really come together—there is no intention of a happy ending. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.

4/5 stars

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
and
“Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.”

The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.

Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.

I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).


Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve not seen (Source.)

The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.

The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.

The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old “man from Cholon” after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.

I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.

Red Flags

“He breathes her in, the child…
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished…
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up…
I became his child.”

It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.

This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert’s deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.

The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.

“How can innocence be disgraced?”
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.

Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!


Image: Woman waving a red flag (Source.)

In 18 months, they don’t talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.

The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong “Love... in its first violence”!

Ambiguous Morality

Duras’ interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:

•tWhen writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.

•tShe makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.

•tShe writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.

•tBut she also writes that she’s “where she has to be, placed here”, which sounds like less of a choice.

•tMost unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
“She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.”

Ambiguous Truth

“The story of my life does not exist.”

Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 “that might have been taken”, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for “crucial ambiguity”. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?

However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.

It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.

Quotes

•t“The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour” and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.”

•t“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

•t“When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.”

•t“Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death… the mysterious death of lovers without love.”

Conclusion

This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.

It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who’ve had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family’s acceptance of the financial aspect.

The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.

Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings.

A little book about an intense, illicit affair between a 15 yr old poor white girl and a wealthy 27 year old Chinese man.
Duras writes a very atmospheric novella here..
I liked it