There is nothing sweet or romantic about it. In Rachel Kushner’s introduction, she aligns Duras herself with the content and craft of The Lover, saying: “Does it matter that she was sexy? In a sense, yes, because it allowed her to feed her insatiable need, so biographers report, for erotic attention, and to understand her way around desire, which is to say, around writing.”Īt root, The Lover is a depiction of a beautiful, pure-yet-impure, agonising desire.
#The lover duras setting full#
In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added together one by one like time, like the long days of waiting.” “They dress just for the sake of dressing.
The Lover also offers an account of the world of the white colonisers, specifically of the women. She is barely yet a woman, blankly unconcerned, alive only in the present, and utterly ruthless, in that way only the young can be. She mistreats him, exposes him to the ridicule of her brothers. The girl, never named, only ever “she” or “I”, is almost disdainful of her lover, disgusted by his abject lust. It contains a dazzling depiction of the immense power in which a woman can bathe when she’s the object of such adoration – a first-hand perspective rarely captured in writing, at least in my experience. It’s the story of a 15-year-old girl from a French family, embarking on a sexual relationship with the son of a Chinese millionaire, who becomes painfully enraptured with her. Duras recreates the warm haze of the Saigon of her childhood so powerfully, steam rises from the pages. I hope to one day have the necessary skills to read L’Amant in French I have been practising the language just for novels like this.The Lover was written when Duras was 70, and floats delicately in that soft, nebulous space between memoir and make-believe. You may notice that I have been reading a decent amount of French literature lately and it is because of novels like this that I am currently obsessed. I was even tempted to carry this novel around, just so I can read a passage or two while I had a spare moment. I want to dip in and out of this book and I have only just finished it. Though I have to say it was Marguerite Duras skilful use of narrative devices that really made this a new favourite. I was thrilled by The Lover and the passionate love affair in this novel.
I had thought that class struggle and colonialism would have played a bigger part in a book like this but I feel that Marguerite Duras handled the idea well with just how the characters interacted with each other. You can see the disapproving opinions playing out from her widowed mother but it was the wealthy father who had the biggest impact on the Chinese businessman’s relationship. Since it is a love affair between a young French girl and an older Chinese man in Saigon, I think we need to talk about colonialism when reflecting on L’Amant. I think this was what brought The Lover together and what stuck with me the most.
The whole idea of a first love and then reflecting back on it many years later only to find that what you thought was a great love was merely an infatuation. The depiction of love was so masterfully done in the novel, I knew exactly how Duras was feeling. Explain that The Lover is an autobiographical novel set in Indochina (now. The Lover was published when Marguerite Duras was seventy, fifty-five years after she met Léo while traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta from her home in the town of Sa Đéc, to her boarding school in Saigon. First, both the Young Duras and her Chinese lover are breaking racial taboos. For me the effects of these literary devices offered an ideal contemplation into the emotions Marguerite must have been going through and also providing a meditation into the art of writing. To do this Duras often switches perspective from first person to third person as well as switching from a current point in the story to a flashback. The narrative devices adopted in L’Amant allows Marguerite Duras to tell an autobiographical story while offering a form of self-reflection and way to analyse her own feelings. What makes this a literary masterpiece is the exploration into desire (and colonialism) and the experimental style that Duras adopted for this novel. Set in the colony of French Indochina (now known as Vietnam) during the 1920s, the novel explores the salacious love affair between a fifteen-and-a-half year-old French girl and a wealthy Chinese man. Marguerite Duras is best known for her novel L’Amant ( The Lover), which was published in 1984 and won the Prix Goncourt for that year. Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
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