s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > The Lover

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

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.

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 Hiroshima mon amour , 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.’