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    The Lover
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    The Lover
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    The Lover
    Ebook115 pages2 hours

    The Lover

    By Marguerite Duras

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances’ coveted Prix Goncourt, ‘The Lover’ is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl’s family apart.

    Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.

    A sensational international bestseller, 'The Lover' is disturbing, erotic, masterly and simply unforgettable.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 11, 2012
    ISBN9780007393206
    Unavailable
    The Lover
    Author

    Marguerite Duras

    Marguerite Duras was one of Europe’s most distinguished writers. The author of many novels and screenplays, she is perhaps best known outside France for her filmscript Hiroshima Mon Amour and her Prix Goncourt-winning novel THE LOVER, also filmed. Her other books include LA DOLEUR, BLUE EYES BLACK HAIR, SUMMER RAIN and THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. Born in Indochina in 1914, Marguerite Duras died in 1996.

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    Reviews for The Lover

    3.5/5

    1,124 ratings47 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Ik weet niet wat het was, maar het lukte me gewoon niet om dit nochtans dunne boekje gelezen te krijgen. Misschien is het de filmische stijl van Duras.
    • 3/5

      Best of 1984 Challenge.....(which I may or may not finish)

      I'm not rating this, because I really don't care one way or the other about it.

      Fifteen years old, crossing the river on a ferry, in a worn sleeveless silk dress, gold lame sandals on her feet, an flat man's fedora on her head.....she meets a Chinese man 12 years her senior in a black limousine. The go to a room in town and they become lovers.

      Her life is crap, her mother head mistress, her father dead, her younger brother just there, & her older brother afraid of her, yet abusive.....

      There is no apparent sense of time, just bits of the story crossing its own time worn path.

      Even when there are tears, anger, loss there is no sadness, no feelings, no emotions...... It's all as if written in dream time. Not even the so called "erotic" has feelings in this book..... Lyrical yet empty.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite books; such an amazing love story. Beautiful.
    • 2/5
      Ik weet niet wat het was, maar het lukte me gewoon niet om dit nochtans dunne boekje gelezen te krijgen. Misschien is het de filmische stijl van Duras.
    • 2/5
      Shades of Lolita. Gag.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful!
    • 3/5
      I think I need to see the movie to appreciate this book. I picked it up because I was traveling in Cambodia at the time and was in the area the film was made.
    • 4/5
      THE LOVER, a novel by Marguerite Duras, is a book I've had on my to-read list ever since I read a review of the film adaptation more than twenty years ago. The book is probably autobiographical fiction, since I have read that almost all of Duras's books are based on her own life. The book was first published in 1984 and Duras died in 1996.While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..." Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple - "... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 2/5
      Meh. I was not impressed. This is about a 15-year-old girl having an affair with a 27-year-old man. Nothing to write about except as a warning.
    • 5/5
      I really loved this short novel. I finished it in a night. The story was beautiful and haunting. I could see how Duras influenced later women writers. Absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a love story or anyone looking to follow Maugham's Painted Veil with something similar.
    • 2/5
      Did nothing for me. Felt like a loose sketch for a novel which was never completed. Some questionable writing too (perhaps a translation issue?). For example "Going back to Saigon I feel I'm going on a journey, especially when I take the bus, and this morning I've taken the bus"... Yeesh.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      it was hard to follow her memories and her
      present state of mind. Not enough background on reason for brothers condition. perhaps a ideal book to discuss with friends or reading group. no definates, just speculations.
    • 3/5
      Great story
    • 3/5
      I believe we all have memories like these – distant, random, mixed with pain, mixed with joy, a purposeful vagueness that is possibly self-induced. The thoughts are disclosed like word-puke, somewhat jumbled, non-linear, occasionally repetitive as though to reinforce the thought, colored with poetic prose, incomplete but the feeling is confirmed. This is what I felt reading Duras’ ‘The Lover’, an autobiographical novel of her youth in Saigon, particularly of her Lover.It’s 1929. The fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl is in Saigon with her mom, a headmistress in a local school who is a manic-depressive widow, an elder brother who is violent, cruel, and a thief, and an elder brother who is referred to as ‘younger brother’ who is kind and gentle but lives in fear of the elder brother’s fist. They are broke and are known as the ‘layabouts’. On a ferry, the girl meets a 30-something wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese that evolves into a year and a half affair. Though wealthy, he is controlled by his father who owns the family’s money and forbids any consideration of their union. The affair ends when she leaves Saigon returning to France. The emotions are complex as I am sure it was for Duras then and at the time of writing (published in 1984) and for the reader. Needless to say, there is an ickiness with the underage relationship. But it’s more than that with a certain amount of reciprocation and desire on her part – he was her temporary (hours at a time) escape from her reality. She is not seeking pity, yet her words draw you into her darkness. There is an economy of words in her lack of details, but there is also an excess of words to provide a certain dreaminess, that poetic feeling. But as the reader, we know there is nothing pleasant here and that just adds to the ickiness. The narrator speaks of “I”, but also regularly speaks of the protagonist in the third person – the girl, the white girl, the girl with a man’s hat, as though these memories are detachments and denials, not of hers, not of her fifteen to seventeen-year-old self. She also wrote of her lust for her beautiful classmate, her best friend, lusting of her body, of her breasts. She recognizes her own sexual ‘perverseness’ but ignores her sexual confusion. Perhaps the above is what makes this an award-winning book – that a nearly seventy-year old self can converge her complex teenage years into a haunting tale. Alas, it is not for me. Lastly, I was annoyed with the stereotype description of the Chinese male, his lack of masculinity, his softness, his weeping. Even though I know it’s her truth and likely the truth of that time, it’s still rather off-putting. Some quotes:On Beauty – and it’s one heck of a pickup line for a mature lady:“One day, when 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.” On Desire:“You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glace or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.”
    • 3/5
      There are flashes of poetic brilliance in ‘The Lover’, and it has a pretty strong ending, evoking sentimental memories of first love and time gone by. Unfortunately, the narrative style, which has Duras sifting through her memories and writing almost conversationally, is hit and miss. The story is of a fifteen year old French girl from a poor and dysfunctional family who has an affair with a Chinese man in his thirties in Saigon. At home, she has a bad relationship with her mother, her oldest brother is a profligate, and tragedy awaits her other brother. At boarding school, she fantasizes over another girl, and awaits being picked up by her lover’s limousine. Their physical relations give her pleasure, but there is a creepiness about them, beyond the fact that she’s underage. Overall, the book has a vagueness and a malaise to it, which was perhaps the intended effect, and honest to Duras’s true experience, as the book is autobiographical. It doesn’t always make for pleasant reading though. Quotes:On aging:“One day, when 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.”On death:“It was a mistake, and the momentary error filled the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn’t noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother’s body while he was alive, and we hadn’t noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother’s body was dead, and immortality with it. And the world went on without that visited body, and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.”
    • 4/5
      Its an emotional book, shocking and at times a slightly disturbing book. But I continiued to read, wanting to know more and more. Hoping that the end was what I hoped. It wasn't, but that didnt stop me from enjoying this book.
    • 1/5
      Its fantastic
    • 5/5
      Nina and the day off today so I can do it again and see the same day at
    • 4/5
      The Lover treads lines been between enigmatic and thready, subtle and shallow, frustrating as hell and heaven in a book. Fortunately, it came out on the right side of the lines for my tastes. Readers of Gide and Colette will probably like, or even love, Duras's novella.
    • 5/5
      assured, sensual, obnoxiously confident elliptical writing.
    • 3/5
      I was very interested in reading The Lover after having watched the film and glad to enjoy the same tone of sadness and desire. I did find it a bit hard to follow at times and with an odd flip flopping of point of view, which I assume is intentional. This book is supposedly autobiographical and I imagine that Duras writes from the past as if seeing a ghost or image of herself, and uses "the girl" or "I" interchangeably. If you want something short, unique, and sensual on a rainy summer day, this is it.
    • 1/5
      Autobiographischer Roman Duras', Rahmenhandlung bildet die Sexbeziehung der damals fünfzehnjährigen Autorin mit einem mehr als doppelt so alten chinesischen Millionärssohn im zum französischen Kolonialreich gehörenden Indochina vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg.Das Buch ist den tollen Kritiken zum Trotz eine Enttäuschung auf der ganzen Linie: Zusammenhanglos aneinandergereihte Erinnerungsfetzen aus frühester Kindheit der Autorin bis ins heute lassen einen Erzähl- und Spannungsbogen vermissen, vieles bleibt offen und ungeklärt. Wer den Roman übrigens (wie ich) im Zusammenhang zur Einstimmung auf einen Südostasienurlaub lesen will, wird übrigens genauso enttäuscht: Er könnte genauso gut in den Vereinigten Staaten oder in Djibouti spielen, kulturelle Einflüsse Indochinas, Lokalkolorit, exotische Stimmung oder zumindest nachvollziehbare Kulisse sucht man vergebens...Übrigens kein Vergleich zur Verfilmung des Stoffs von Jean-Jacques Annaud aus dem Jahr 1992, in diesem Fall ist der Film deutlich besser als das literarische Original....
    • 4/5
      Autobiographical story of growing up in Vietnam. Her parents are teachers. The father dies and the mother stays. They are poor. The mother has a mental illness and doesn't really pay attention to the children. The oldest son steals everything from the family to support his drug habit. The girl, age 15, becomes a lover to a Chinese male.There is no connectivity to anything. She write emotionless and describes sex as something she is observing. Is she actually being sexually abused to support the family and no one does anything to stop it?
    • 4/5
      Intriguing, fascinating, and real. Marguerite mixes times, events, feelings but all in a captivating form, never loosing the readers interest.
    • 2/5
      I saw the movie first and loved it so much that I bought the book, as one learns more about the characters, in print, rather than on screen. But the book proved disappointing. Still I am glad I read it because it was the source of the beautifully projected movie. Seemed like the characters were just flowing like leaves in flood water having no power over their own lives leaving everything to fate except maybe the Chinese man's passion and obsession with the girl; but again he was helpless to take the reins of his life in his own hands and so succumbed to the wishes of his father and society.
    • 3/5
      Hmm, I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's an easy read ... the paperback is only 117 pages, and the language is not difficult. It's written beautifully, but I felt very detached from the main character, as though I couldn't quite "get" her and everything she was trying to express. I enjoyed reading this, but it left me puzzled. It's worth checking out, and it may greatly impact you and strike you as a "work of literary genius" (from the back cover). Or, it might not. I think this one depends on who you, the reader, are, and on the experiences you have had.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure I really understood this book, my first attempt at a work by Duras. It's an autobiographical novel about a young white girl and her affair with an older Chinese man in Indochina. The title suggests this is the main narrative thread, but the narrator's relationship with her everchanging mother and her two brothers is also central. The problem for me was that I felt like I didn't have enough inside information to understand what was really going on. This was more like a series of musings and I didn't have the necessary background information to fill in the gaps.I found the writing style unique and interesting. Words like misty, meandering, and dreamy come to mind. I also found my internal reading voice reading the words in monotone. Duras also shifts point of view subtly - using "I" at the beginning and "she" by the end. Not sure why.This was an interesting reading experience, but I think I need to read more of Duras's writing to truly get it.
    • 5/5
      "Very early in my life it was too late."The Lover by Marguerite Duras is a powerfully moving meditation on identity and death. Although prose, it is nearly poetic in form, and exceptionally poetic in tone and imagery. Framed by two Stygian boat rides, the first into "the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal," the narrator hypnotizes the reader with an elegy for herself, for a lover, for her brother:“People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such—it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle. Certain people may harbor it, on condition they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Just as certain other people may detect its presence in them, on the same condition, that they don’t know they can. It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void. Look at the dead sands of the desert, the dead bodies of children: there’s no path for immortality there, it must halt and seek another way.”It is so rewarding and easy to get lost in Barbara Bray’s translation of Duras’s language, whether the narrator is sharing her impressions of the evil in her family, her lover’s desperation, her classmate’s breasts, the rivers of Asia, or the memories of rooms and sounds. This may be one of the most consistently sad narratives I have ever read, but it delivers the cumulative effect of a cleansing meditation. It’s the kind of book that when you finish it, you make a mental note to have yourself read it again at some later point in your life. I suppose one could read this book from various perspectives, whether feminist or colonial or whatever, but let me encourage you to simply lose yourself in a heartbreaking lament for the intense privacy of our lives and the ineffable sadness of our deaths.
    • 5/5
      Dearest Marguerite,

      I know it is awfully late now, to write to you. I could not resist though. I thought about you the other day; as her eyes scanned the Chinese gentleman for the first time, on the ferry to Mekong. The demure young features veiled under a mannish hat, gave away precocious impression of a 15 year old girl as he offered her a cigarette. The statuesque Chinaman who exuded charm and eloquence was besotted by her as she was by him. He was to be her lover; an escape from the abhorrent and impoverished life. On the brink of her sexual exploration, she yearned for the pleasure of his touch, his embrace; a world that was beyond the imagination of a young school girl. As she pressed her red-stained lips on the cold glass of his car, he knew he could never marry her, a fact that he told her several times, but would always love her, for “A love like this, so strong, it never happens again in a lifetime…never.”

      As the movie played on my screen, I searched for your book and there it lay among the dusty pile of old books, a slight tattered at the cover page. An affair of a pubescent girl with a 27-year old affluent Chinese man brings variation in one’s perception. Over the years, the book was disparaged for its pedophilic nature and the overtly sexual display of a young girl romanticizing to the term 'prostitutes'. The girl’s impecunious and abusive family history, they said was a convenient backdrop to pen a fragile child pornographic literary piece. From the time I read the book as an 12 year old, when I accidentally “borrowed” the book from my cousin’s library stock to those several occasions, I comprehended the writings as an adult, all I observed was a power struggle of an adolescent who naively used her sexuality to find a sense of belonging and in some way gain control over her existence. The story is far more complicated than just the exterior of a love affair. It delineates a distorted notion of true love (if the term is applicable here), the hypocrisy of social mores and the chaos derived from infidelity and wealth.

      I have cherished the book for decades now, and words fail me in expressing my heartwarming thankfulness for bursting my initial deluded bubble of an idyllic Nancy Drew utopia, exposing the discrepancies of a flawed society and sullied emotions. Life unexpectedly became a rational place to live in.

      R.I. P. – Ms. Duras.


      From,
      The 7th grader, who once scribbled ‘orgasm’ for the very first time in her history textbook and became wiser.