She has no intention of fulfilling her mother’s ambitions for her to do well in mathematics so that she can become a teacher: she knows that she is her mother’s only hope left – but she wants to be a writer. The girl also has power within her own dysfunctional family. Indeed, he maintains his love for her long into old age… She tells him that she desires him because of his money, but he isn’t repulsed. Her Chinese lover hesitates when she is naked before him but she takes charge.
From the outset, it is she who is in control.
Her clothes are cobbled together by the faithful Dó but they are shabby and by inference not sexually alluring.īut the girl, as it turns out, has sexual power.
She is also subject to fits of depression and drifts about from one place to another, managing only to have the luxury of declining to eat if they didn’t like the cheap meals cooked by their houseboy. This mother has no power: after the death of her husband and some bad investment decisions she is poor by white Indochinese standards, and her elder son’s sadism and criminality has made her a pariah in her own community. He is not only older than her, he is also a member of the wealthy Chinese community and she is the daughter of a woman who’s lost control of her life. The 21st century reader attuned to the prevalence of child abuse fears for the naïveté of this girl when she gets into a car with a man she does not know. On her way back to school after a holiday, the girl tests her own power of sexual allure by dressing provocatively in a silk dress, gold lamé high heels and a man’s fedora hat. The novella, it seems to me, is primarily about power. (These days, the entrepreneurial Vietnamese have opened the house of that lover, Huynh Thuy Le, to the public for literary pilgrimage!) Like the mother of the girl in the story, Duras’s mother ran a school, and like the nameless girl* in the story, Duras had an inter-racial affair with the son of a wealthy Chinese family. But that is not the only autobiographical element. The story is set in Sa Dec on the Mekong Delta in French Indochina in the 1930s, where Duras lived as a girl. The book was adapted for film in 1992 as The Lover. The book was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt, (the most prestigious of French prizes and the one which is for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”). My edition was translated by Barbara Bray for the first English edition in 1985 so it didn’t take long for the novella to reach its international audience. Wikipedia tells me that it was first published in 1984 by Les Éditions de Minuit, and has since been translated into 43 languages. *chuckle* Call me cynical if you like, but perhaps the book was fêted as much for its provocative theme as for the brilliance of its style! It is the story of a transgressive love affair between a fifteen-year-old girl and a Chinese man ten years older. With its shifts between the first and third person, the use of flashbacks and its impressionistic disrupted style, Duras’ writing is very cinematic, influenced as she was by the French nouveau roman of the 1950s. Written when Marguerite Duras was 70 years old and superbly translated by Barbara Bray, The Lover is included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die for good reason. An intense, provocative gaze, daring the reader… and how fascinating to discover that it’s an image of the author herself when she was a young woman!