The Lover
— 1984 —
New York: Pantheon, 1997; translated from the French by Barbara Bray with an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston; 117 pages; published in French as L’Amant
FIRST LINES
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.”
PLOT SUMMARY
The taboo relationship between a French teenager and an older Chinese man is at the heart of this complex, intense novel. Largely set in the 1930s, during the French colonial era in what is now Vietnam, it is recounted much later by a Frenchwoman—who says at the opening she is “already old.”
The premise of the narrative is simple: lovers from two different worlds embark on a doomed relationship. The story centers on a poor and fatherless teenage schoolgirl who encounters a man twelve years older than she is. The unnamed man, son of a wealthy Chinese businessman, sees the girl on the ferry she rides to school. She wears gold lamé shoes—“Bargains, final reductions bought for me by my mother”—and a brownish-pink fedora. The man offers her a ride in his limousine.
What ensues is an obsessive sexual liaison between the two. The girl’s impoverished family, her mother and two brothers, grudgingly accepts and even encourages this relationship—in essence, prostituting the girl—as the man buys them dinner. The couple’s furtive meetings continue until the day the girl is sent to France to attend university.
Plot is secondary to style here. The narrative flows, almost hypnotically, with little concern for chronological fidelity, as the author recalls both the passionate intensity and enormous despair of her youth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MARGUERITE DURAS
Born in French Indochina on April 4, 1914, Marguerite Donnadieu was the daughter of the headmistress of a girls’ school and a mathematics professor. Suffering from dysentery, Marguerite’s father returned to France and died there in 1918, while Marguerite remained in Vietnam with her mother and two brothers. The family’s savings were lost in a disastrous rice-farming venture and they were left desperately poor—and often hungry. The young Marguerite sometimes hunted birds and small game to survive.
Many of these biographical details align closely with those of the character in The Lover. At the age of fifteen, Marguerite also had met a wealthy man who became her lover. In 1932, she left Indochina and went to France to study. “Later, Duras said the depiction in ‘The Lover’ was her actual childhood,” critic and novelist Rachel Kushner wrote in 2017, “but those who knew her best suggest she had begun to confuse her fiction with reality.”
In France, Duras took her pen name from her father’s hometown. She married her first husband, writer Robert Antelme, in 1939, the year World War II began, and her first book, Les Impudents, was published in 1943, the same year that the couple joined the French Resistance. Robert Antelme was captured and held in Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, as a political prisoner. He nearly starved to death before being liberated.
While her husband was still a prisoner, Duras began an affair with French writer Dionys Mascolo. After Robert recovered, they ended up in a ménage à trois. In 1947, Duras divorced Robert and married Mascolo, with whom she had one child.
After the war, Duras went on to join the Communist Party, from which she was later expelled. She wrote novels, essays, and plays, winning a loyal but relatively small readership. Her breakthrough came with the original screenplay she wrote for Hiroshima mon amour (1959), a landmark in modern French cinema. Set in 1959 in the city leveled by the atomic bomb, the movie explores the relationship between a French actress and a Japanese architect, identified only as Elle (Her) and Lui (Him).
The publication of The Lover when she was seventy years old catapulted her to new heights. The book won France’s chief literary award, the Prix Goncourt, and became an international best seller, selling millions of copies, both in France and in translation into forty languages, according to Pantheon, her American publisher.
For much of her life, Duras struggled with alcoholism and emphysema, which left her in a coma for five months in 1988. Despite the hardships, she said she found love again in a relationship with a younger gay man, Yann Andréa Steiner, a writer with whom she shared her final years.
In a 1990 interview quoted in her New York Times obituary, she said:
I write about love, yes, but not about tenderness. I don’t like tender people. I myself am very harsh. When I love someone, I desire them. But tenderness supposes the exclusion of desire.
Marguerite Duras died in her Left Bank home in Paris on March 3, 1996, aged eighty-one.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
The jacket of one paperback edition of the novel promises something of a “disturbing, erotic” sensation. If you are expecting Fifty Shades of Grey—or even Lady Chatterley’s Lover—you may be disappointed. The Lover is demure by contemporary standards. Far from explicit, its action and even the protagonist’s youth were hardly shocking when it first appeared.
The novel is not well-dressed pornography. It is a woman’s reflection, in her old age, of the force of youthful passion and the loss of something irretrievable. As the girl departs by ship for France, she hears a Chopin waltz. Duras writes:
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 her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon.
Shortly after Duras died, New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal wrote an appraisal:
Name a current literary trend, and the French writer Marguerite Duras almost certainly got to it first—and took it further than anyone working today. The melding of memoir and artifice called autofiction; the fondness for fragments; the evasive, obliquely wounded female narrator; the excavations into trauma, addiction, maternity.
Many of these ingredients can be found in The Lover, which novelist and critic Rachel Kushner calls “disclosure,” in an introduction to an edition of Duras’s notebooks. Kushner writes:
Duras became a huge star. Readers were eager to wade into a steamy vision of a colonial childhood and to presume it was her life. As a novel it is no more conventional than her others, but in its vivid compactness, the way it marbles and integrates the close and distant sensations and memories of one mind, it is a kind of artistic zenith.
With a narrative style that does not follow a straight timeline, it is a challenging read. Brooding and intense, it is far from a lighthearted or sentimental reflection on “lost innocence.” Nor is it a romantic tale of first love remembered like something out of Nicholas Sparks. Duras is, as she described herself, “harsh.” And The Lover is a stark—yes, in the author’s word, “harsh”—reflection on passion, despair, sex, and death.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities is a single volume that collects the novel with essays and journals by Duras. Begin with that edition if you are interested in deeper insight into this influential writer’s life and work.
To delve further into her fiction, consider Hiroshima mon amour. Before The Lover became a literary sensation, Duras was most famous for the screenplay of this modern classic of French New Wave cinema. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the script is available in book form.
Among Duras’s many other works, the earlier novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein in French, 1964; English translation, 1966) recounts a woman who returns to the scene of her past breakup with a lover and attempts to re-create this moment from the past.