Vom ersten Satz an taucht man in diese Geschichte ein. Ein europäisches Mädchen lebt mit ihrer Mutter und ihren beiden Geschwistern in Saigon. Sie will weg aus dieser Familie. Geliebt wird nur der älteste Sohn, obwohl er stiehlt, war er finden kann. Im Alter von 15 Jahren trifft sie einen älteren Chinesen aus reicher Familie. Er verliebt sich sofort in sie und sie beginnen eine heftige sexuelle Affäre. Ergreifend geschrieben!

I realized while I was ranting trying to convince a friend why this book is a must-read earlier today that I sounded like the Stefon character from SNL. I mean, this book has everything that I love, the vibes are immaculate. It’s like
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This book has EVERYTHING: bleakness, desire, shame, novella length, devastating self-reflections, perfect prose, class commentary, power dynamics, depressing family dynamics, queer desire, smadding—you know that thing where the book is so sad it makes you smile because depraved and depressing novels are very much your jam, you freaky little book nerd, you—regret, French people, critiques of masculinity, critiques of colonialism, metafiction, unhinged decision making, this is a festival of fucked and feverish feelings in 120pgs and a pleasure unto death.

I read this in a single sitting and I’m sitting here hours later still emotionally shaken. This is very much my sort of thing. Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, we should do a Review right? Stefon, this is a GOODREADS. Okay, okay, you’re right, here goes:

Memory is a butterfly flitting by in flashes and if we try to pin it down, to put our finger on the fluttering of the past, it often turns to powder upon our fingers. Memory fades or is altered by our act of trying to capture it, yet memory also has the ability to seemingly fold time. ‘Very early in my life, it was too late,’ French author Marguerite Duras writes in The Lover, a statement that directly addresses the method for which past and present become intertwined and timeless in her recollections much the way this novelistic memoir blends biography and fiction. The result is pure literary bliss. Winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt and presented here in beautiful translation by Barbara Bray (for which she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1986) that captures the endlessly poetic potency of Duras’ prose, The Lover is a novel of memory, but it is also an examination of desire and navigating the self amidst family, death, social class and social taboos. This is also a novel of crossings such as the girl’s crossing of the Mekong river that often feels like the center of gravity to the narrative, the crossing of culture and age between the girl and the older Chinese man who becomes her lover, and even a crisscrossing of the timeline found in the fragmentary narrative style. A whirlwind of reflections and the ravages of desire, The Lover is as crisp as it is confident and completely shook up my heart.
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From the 1992 film adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Duras constructs a portrait of a woman across her many ages, all spiraling into one, and opens on a pitch perfect look at the course of a life all within one face:

‘One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’

This was a book that completely ravaged me as well. With Duras’ exquisite prose punctuated by bold assertions and harsh assessments, with the exhaustion of fragile love at the mercy to society yet burning with unquenchable passion, with the haunting looks at family and identity in the clutches of social order and colonialism, and with the rapid fire of memories that are practically flung into your face. The story is told in brief vignettes that ignore any linearity. The reflections come almost at random and almost all at once, as if Duras has dropped and shattered a jar of memories and is frantically gathering them up as they attempt to roll away underfoot. These memories are based in biography (though no previous knowledge of Duras is necessary) but take wings of fiction, almost as if to impress the theme that to touch memory or to try and understand or shape it is to rewrite it and overlay the elusive past. It’s as she writes herself:

‘The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre 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. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less — I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same.’

You can feel this strong lifeforce in every sentence and word as Duras transforms herself into art upon the page. The story bears many similarities to the film n  Hiroshima mon amourn, for which Duras’ wrote the screenplay, and plays with Duras’ own experience in Vietnam when it was still called French Indochina. It was her most popular novel, published when Duras was 70, though while working on the 1992 film adaptation she would lament over the popularity of the book. In her biography Marguerite Duras: A Life by Laure Adler, Duras is quoted as telling director Jean-Jacques Annaud ‘the Lover is a load of shit…it’s an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.’ Personally I found it delightful but I do enjoy the admission of intoxication during the writing process as the cavalcade of observations strung across tenuous connections does indeed feel like the confident logic of a brilliant mind greased up and ready to rant after a few drinks.

‘She wasn’t sure that 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.’

The novel is best remembered for the relationship between the teenage girl and the older, wealthy Chinese man she meets after crossing the Mekong River. Crossings are a large theme of the novel, and while the girl only crosses the river twice, the second time to leave the man behind and return to France, the narrator is now crossing for a third time—metaphorically—to reinvestigate the site of her memories. It is a taboo relationship, though the focus is less on the torrid love affair and more on the curious power dynamics between them. He is wealthy, experienced and much older (it is mentioned he would be arrested due to her being so young), yet, socially, she holds all the power. She is French and white and he is Chinese. She is the colonizer and he is the colonized. Even her poverty seems to not matter and she admits he is only able to obtain her because of his access to wealth.

‘poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you.’

A lot of this book takes a swift swipe at the house of cards that is patriarchy and masculinity. The girl (the unnamed characters make them fairly symbolic as a larger social critique, perchance?) has no masculine figure in her life (her father has been in the ground a minute) and often adopts elements of gender-role-reversal. It is in order to obtain a way away from this life as she understand that the goal in life is ‘not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.’ Her most distinguishing visual element frequently referenced in the text is a large, flat-brimmed hat usually worn by men. While being noted as a discounted hat to nudge the aspect of her poverty and resourcefulness, it also shows her taking on a masculine role almost as a costume and a symbol of her desire for independence. It works, as it does attract her lover and gives her access to his money, and we see how she frequently describes him in terms of weakness and subservience to her. Even his sense of dominance as sexually experienced is described in terms as a response to fear:

‘he’s a man who must make love a lot, a man who’s afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear.’

This stems from another element of the strange power dynamic too. Even despite the inappropriateness , legally and socially, of him sleeping with a minor she is still in a position of dominance due to her status as a white, French family. There is a startling moment where he is trying to impress her family, showing them the sights and cuisine and they refuse to even acknowledge he exists. The man is in tears asking why they abuse him so as they ignore him, gorging themselves on food and insulting the city. It is a powerful moment that shows the rampant racism embedded in obdurate social hierarchies where even this millionaire is less than human to the poor, white family.

‘I am worn out with desire.’

More on the family in a moment but I can’t move away from the erotic aspects of the novel and the discussions on sex and the body as a sort of metaphor for land being colonized without also bringing up the queer desires in the novel. The narrator reflects on Hélène Lagonelle and her nude body, bold and unashamed as if oblivious to the desire and power her naked figure represents. It is through her that the narrator wishes to pass her sexual appetites for the man into her, almost as if conquering Hélène’s body by having his be the one to take it as he does her own. ‘I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers,’ she thinks, ‘I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.’

‘We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.’

Her family is another major theme of the novel, such as her disdain for her older brother, her passion and awareness of mortality found in her younger brother and most notable, the struggles to keep a family and her own mental state together found in the mother. The Lover is as much a portrait of the mother as it is the daughter. It is a family held together by shame, disgraced by their fall from financial security yet still higher on the social hierarchy in French Indochina. But also this passage completely slayed me:

‘We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves.’

While society is constantly seen as the oppressor—more so for the lover, who is even threatened to be cut off from his family fortune if he continues with the girl—they also, shamefully, cling to society in the ways it gives them a leg up. It becomes rather self-effacing. Though the brother, who is a real shithead, also further represents colonialism, refusing to find work and spending his days engaged in theft and perversion to uphold himself. The younger brother, however, becomes the doorway through which the narrator learns ‘immortality is mortal.’ His death shakes her and makes her realize life is fleeting and death is inevitable.

‘its while its being lived that life is immortal, while its still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown’

All this culminates into her turning both inward and backward on her life in reflection. It is notable that her reflections tend to focus on photographs and images of herself, as a primary theme of the novel is the idea that the self shown to the world, ones image, is what society values. There is a strong juxtaposition of interior self versus exterior self, and her reflections attempt to bridge the gaps.

‘It's as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that.’

In her novel Shame, French Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux contrasts her ideas of memory with that of Marcel Proust, for whom memory is exterior to the self. She explains his perspective of memory found in ‘things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind.’ For Ernaux, however, she finds ‘ the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.’ Duras’ The Lover seems to align more with Ernaux, particularly in the fragmented nature of the self as reflected by the narrative style, but also that the external self is a false self that does not serve as a reliable compass towards identity. It is more fit for social hierarchy and posturing, though she also finds this serves a purpose that the interior self cannot achieve. It is only late in life with a ‘ravaged face’ that she feels her external and internal self align more authentically. A moving and often devastating read, The Lover contains multitudes in its succinct space. It is no wonder this has become a classic work and Duras certainly demonstrates her exemplary prowess of prose and thought.

4.5/5

‘And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.’

Τι μπορω να πω για αυτο το βιβλιο? Με αφησε πραγματικα άφωνη.δε νομιζω να εχω ξαναδιαβασει κατι αντιστοιχο, με την εννοια οτι ειναι τοσο ..ζωντανο.ο τροπος γραφης ,οι συνεχεις εναλλαγες προσωπων,χρονων , θεματων..η ωμη γραφη, σε κανει να πιστευεις οτι κρατας στα χερια σου ενα ημερολογιο οι σελιδες του οποιου γραφτηκαν πριν λιγο απο καποιον που βρισκοταν σε κατασταση αμοκ και βιαζεσαι να τις διαβασεις πριν μπει καποιος και σε πιασει. Το οτι ολα αυτα γραφτηκαν το 1984 με φοντο την Ινδοκινα απο μια γυναικα,απλα το καθιστα ενα ακομη πιο σπουδαιο εργο. Προσωπικα με συνεπηρε περισσοτερο απο ολα η σχεση των ατομων που απαρτιζουν αυτη την δυσλειτουργικη οικογενεια της Duras και πως αυτες κατα πασα πιθανοτητα επηρεασαν τις μετεπειτα επιλογες της..εκπληκτικο βιβλιο.

"Κανεις εκτος απο μενα δεν ειδε καθαρα.και απο τη στιγμη που απεκτησα αυτη τη γνωση, την τοσο απλη, οτι δηλαδη το σωμα του μικρου αδελφου μου ηταν και δικο μου,επρεπε να πεθανω.και πεθανα.ο μικρος αδελφος μου με μαζεψε κοντά του,με τραβηξε κοντα του και πεθανα."

A review I choose not to quantify with stars because, although I cannot deny the quality of writing and the profundity of the narrative, it was not an enjoyable reading experience. THE LOVER has been on my must-read list for years, as I slowly work my way through a canon of classics, and I'm glad to have read it. But also glad it's off the list. A slim volume that is wretched with oppressive heat, despair, anger and hopelessness. Duras wrote this in her seventies, and it's purported to be autobiographical, even while the author decried it as a "load of shit". The tone is dreamy and disjointed, shifting between a disaffected third person to a creepily intimate first. It packs, in its 117 pages, themes of race, class, sex, familial misfortune and the degrading effects of colonialism on indigenous cultures. What it's not about is love.

A novella must ALWAYS make a deep impact. Hell, the writer did not think that more was necessary so whatever is there MUST be genius. "The Lover" is heartfelt, autobiographical, strange. The titular Chinese man is not even the focus: it is the brother & how his selfishness dooms the entire family. "L'amant" is about two people coming together in lust/love for only a moment... in solice or absolution. I like "adult" books but this one has the voice of a single victim in a long, sad tradition of "victims." Lose "classic" status, please!

نثر زیبا و شاعرانه دوراس، درهم آمیخته با داستانی شل و ول و البته بیوگرافیک که هیجان و پیچیدگی رمان رو نداره ولی احساسی و متاثر کنندس و بیشتر ته مایه درد دل داره. در این دوره‌ی سراسر تباهی، شاید همه بتونیم بابت زندگی‌های نکرده‌مون تا حد زیادی با خانم دوراس همدردی و همذات پنداری کنیم.
کل این رمان کوتاه به نظر من، ادامه و تشریح یکی از جملاتی هست که دوراس در یکی از پاراگراف های آغازین آورده :

« در زندگیم، خیلی زود، دیر شد.»

۱۴۰۰/۰۶/۲۹

Probably the most famous among the many brilliant works of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), The Lover (French: L’Amant) is based on her actual experience while living in Vietnam during her teen years. Published in 1984, this autobiographical novel has been translated to 43 languages, awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt and was turned into a movie in 1992 starring Jane March as the 15-1/2-y/o French girl Duras and Tony Leung as 17-y/o Chinese Man.

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Yes, the novel (as well as the movie where the scene above was taken) is only for matured readers as it has descriptive sex scenes. The scenes, including the whole novel, are beautifully narrated. Duras made use of shifting first person and third person narrations. At first, I was confused me but later I thought that the reason for the shifts was that she, at some points, wanted to dissociate herself from what was happening in her life. Looking back, she wanted to recall those parts of her life to be like a dream. This should have taken a lot of courage in her part. As Duras published this book in 1984 when she was 70 years old and already a world-renowned novelist and film director. Imagine telling that you lost your virginity to a Chinese man when you were fifteen years old and you agressively did those sexual positions and uttered those unprintable words.

It was a tragic love affair. Both Duras and her lover were still young when they had all those sex and only realized that they loved each other when they were already apart. I was reminded by the young Rose throwing the Pearl of the Sea to the water while remembering Jack with fondless in the closing scenes of James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic. There is no similar scene in The Lover but the ship cabin scene while Chopin pieces were playing and with Duras was crying was particularly moving and you could feel her pain even just by reading those beautiful passages. It will surely make you remember your first love and trigger the what if questions once again.

In a nutshell, The Lover is like Duras' confession before her death twelve years after. It is about racism. The Duras family prohibited her to marry a Chinese while the rich father of her lover wanted him to marry the daughter of a daughter of another rich Chinese family. That even if her French family was penniless and hungry, they still felt superior compared to Asians (Chinese and Vietnamese included) because they have whiter skin. It is about love that blossomed too early to be be acknowledged as such but too late to come into fruition. It's really about the role of the society and how it influences the lives of the people at both sides (conquerors or conquered) of the world.

Kudos to Marguerite Duras. This is a lot better than her other book that I've read early this year, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964). Now, I am geared towards reading my third of her books, The Vice-Consul (1968).

I think I knew from the very first page that this was not a book for me. It's the epitome of things that bothers me with French writers, with many modern writers in general, with boring books. The short sentence structure that builds to no rhythm. The repetition of words to create a cheap effect. The meandering pace. The plain pointlessness of it all.

It's really a bit like listening to a grandmother go on about this and that, jumping from one memory to the next without ever finishing one story and with vague references to things that you've never heard her speak of before. Except that neither one of my grandmothers were this resentful of weird little things, Duras constantly lashes out about this and that ("the seasons never changed, it bored me to tears"), they weren't this obsessed about their appearances (noting constantly their attractiveness), and they weren't this melodramatic (we all wanted to kill each other, constantly, death, death, death).

I suppose that the 'scandalous' nature of the work made it an success. If you can call it a scandal that a young woman of 15, almost, 16 has sex with a man of another ethnic background. I wouldn't. The age difference bothered me a bit, he did have the upper hand in that aspect all race politics aside, and he wasn't very nice calling her names, but it's really hard to know how Duras felt about all this. I guess the whole money exchanging hands aspect of it could be a bit unsettling, but all in all we know very little of all this. In fact we no next to nothing about this Lover, except that he is Chinese, very rich and that Duras considers him weak somehow. The only really touching thing that happens, happens on the very last page of the book.

In fact, beside her lover, all things relating to the country, it's inhabitants, the sights and sounds appear to be completely irrelevant for Duras. The frustrating thing is that there are some intriguing tidbits here and there, but very little. I suppose one should read one of her earlier less experimental books for that.

In my edition the foreword tells us that Duras herself thought very poorly of the book and wished she would have edited it differently. I'm inclined to agree with her.

(Demorei dois dias a reunir 'material' para fazer esta review)

Raramente me acontece estar perante uma situação/livro/discurso que não suscite nada em mim. Isto é, que não me indigne, nem fascine, nem horrorize, nem apaixone. Este livro, infelizmente, foi assim. Reconheço que está maravilhosamente bem escrito e que as reviravoltas textuais da cabeça da narradora, a própria rapariga branca, nos levam por labirintos existentes em nós próprios. Mas importar-me com ela? Não me importei. Nem com ela nem com a família dela. O irmão mais velho é um bandido. Conheço alguns assim; roubam à família para sustentar vícios, destroem-se e à família com o dito. O "irmãozinho" é um doce, demasiado fraco para erguer sequer a voz, sendo por isso o receptáculo de toda a ternura da irmã.

A mãe destes três irmãos é um ser alheado, inconsistente por natureza, que não esconde que apenas ao filho mais velho tudo tolera. É uma mulher marcada pela perda do marido e pela malícia do filho mais velho. Esconde os seus bens nos lençóis de casa. A menina branca é ávida de viver e de aprender. Tirando este escandaloso caso com um chinês (que, apesar de milionário), objecto de grande preconceito e desdém por parte da sua família. Tem momentos de vulnerabilidade, mas nunca tive pena dela. Quanto ao chinês, ama-a e é por ela desprezado e humilhado ao sabor do humor oscilante da jovem de 15 anos. A história é compreensível, porque penso que nem a própria narradora sabe se o amava ou não. Começa o livro ao dizer que aos 18 anos já era tarde demais para si, o que me faz crer que já tinha deixado fugir-lhe a felicidade por entre os dedos. Também pode referir-se à velhice que diz que lhe tomara já o rosto, devido a todos os desgostos e angústias que a família lhe traz.

De momento fiquei sem o bichinho de ler mais Marguerite Duras. Vejamos no futuro.
Baixei a classificação 2 dias depois de 4 para 3,5. Isto é: o livro é bonito em termos literários, por vezes entrei em comunhão com os sentimentos das personagens. Mas não voltei a pensar neles.

"Muy pronto en mi vida fue demasiado tarde. A los 18 años ya era demasiado tarde’’   

Marguerite nos cuenta su historia y la de su familia, una madre directora de una escuela, un hermano menor y un hermano mayor el consentido de la madre, una familia con muy poca comunicación y malos tratos por parte del hermano mayor y de la madre.

- ‘’Nunca buenos días, buenas tardes, buen año. Nunca gracias. Nunca una palabra. Nunca la necesidad de pronunciar una palabra. Todo permanece, mudo, lejano. Es una familia pétrea’'   

Marguerite una joven de 15 años que vive en la indochina francesa y establece una relación con su amante chino de 27 años, es una relación prohibida tanto por la diferencia de edad, la desigualdad racial y la diferencia de clases ya que el amante era un hombre rico y Marguerite era pobre. Con ese hombre inicia su primera relación sexual ‘’Primero hay dolor, y después ese dolor se asimila otra vez, se transforma lentamente arrancado, transportado hacia el goce’’.   
Al inicio la madre no sabe nada acerca de lo que pasa con su hija y el Chino hasta que un día se da cuenta y dice. ‘’que está deshornada, una perra vale más’'.   
El interés en esta relación es el placer y el dinero que recibe del amante para lograr una estabilidad económica. Él sabe que ella nunca lo amará.

Finalmente ambos amantes se separan, pero años después el chino que ya estaba casado con alguien de su raza contacta a Marguerite y le dice que ‘’Todavía la amaba, que nunca podría dejar de amarla, que la amaría hasta la muerte’’  

Fue publicado el año 1984 y ganador del premio Goncourt, en este libro no existe una estructura argumental, simplemente es un conjunto de cosas sin orden, hay una narración en primera persona y en tercera persona.
Es un libro de deseo, de intensidad, de encuentro entre dos cuerpos y de cosas prohibidas. ❤️‍

La storia di una, cento,mille solitudini. Di esistenze gettate nel mondo, che, dietro una facciata in apparenza quieta, celano disperazione nel cuore. Di esistenze che inseguono sogni che non riescono a conseguire e si stringono ad altre in cerca di un amore che non concede il tepore promesso. Di esistenze immerse in una quieta follia disperata. Che vagano come fantasmi in un mondo che rifiutano e li rifiuta. La storia di una solitudine.

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