{"id":1137,"date":"2020-12-24T18:32:46","date_gmt":"2020-12-25T02:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teahousehome.com\/booksandcoffee\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2020-12-24T18:32:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T02:32:46","slug":"book-the-lover-by-marguerite-duras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teahousehome.com\/booksandcoffee\/2020\/12\/24\/book-the-lover-by-marguerite-duras\/","title":{"rendered":"Book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Lover
<\/strong>by Marguerite Duras
translated from French into English by Barbara Bray
published by Pantheon Books, NY
1985<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too – monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently at the gate open on the empty road. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note: This edition of Duras’ concise novel includes an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston, who advises us to interpret the novel as autobiographical, which I might not have done otherwise. She also observes parallels with Duras’ screenplay for <\/em>Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I’ve read, and her observations gave me insights about Duras’ life. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there was a character limit to my remarks about reading this book, I would write something like: at-risk French girl in occupied Vietnam escapes her unhappy home by sleeping with a meek older man; a dire situation, beautifully described.<\/em><\/span> Unluckily for you, I can write all the words I want!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a series of increasingly vivid memories that drift forward and back in time, Duras’ novel tells the story of an impoverished French teen in French-occupied (colonial) Vietnam, living with her deeply depressed mother, two brothers, and a her own developing awareness of mortality. (So FRENCH!) <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our unnamed character’s life is tenuous. She wears her mother’s old, threadbare clothes; the family struggles on her mother’s schoolmistress wages after her father’s unexpected death; a sense of doom hangs over the family; her mother not only falls frequently into immobile despair, but also spoils her sons while pressuring her daughter to make up for their failures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her escape: to get into the limousine of a nervous, fellow foreigner, but one who is not French: a wealthy Chinese man, entirely beholden to his father, but also inappropriately smitten at first sight of this inappropriately dressed, quite underaged teen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel is often (but not always) a first person narration, centering the girl’s alienation from Vietnamese culture and her own (French) family; the alienation of remote colonial life; the constraints of poverty; the scarring, emotional tensions of her household; her self-enforced emotional distance from her unsuitable lover; the pain of her mother’s exploitation; and always – always always –<\/em> a sense that everyone will die and all things must end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prose is visually rich and lightly punctuated as the narrator moves from awkward social interactions of German-occupied France in adulthood to afternoons of being fully absorbed by illicit sex in Vietnam; from invisibility to parental approval for all the wrong reasons<\/em>; forward to deaths, and backward to youth. It starts as a novel, and winds up a vivid, non-linear series of beautifully described recollections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It absorbed me completely, and I’m glad I read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Loverby Marguerite Durastranslated from French into English by Barbara Braypublished by Pantheon Books, NY1985 On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too – monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently … <\/p>\n

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