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3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
I was excited at first that I finally got my hand on this one since a friend raved about it endlessly. I knew there’s a trigger warning regarding the age between the heroine and her lover. I also knew there’s a different kind of social class where the white european is lower than the asian.
And so I read it. It was about a dysfunctional family where the mother did not care for her daughter, and the elder brothers were self-centre. It was also a daddy issue, the father died when the unnamed main character was very young. She then found refuged from a rich older male. I got cringed for the sexual description between under age poor female and rich mature male.
Then the narratives were difficult to follow. The heroine becomes unreliable. The plot jumped irregularly, I could not catched up.
And so I read it. It was about a dysfunctional family where the mother did not care for her daughter, and the elder brothers were self-centre. It was also a daddy issue, the father died when the unnamed main character was very young. She then found refuged from a rich older male. I got cringed for the sexual description between under age poor female and rich mature male.
Then the narratives were difficult to follow. The heroine becomes unreliable. The plot jumped irregularly, I could not catched up.
emotional
medium-paced
This book is so annoying??? I loved a few passages in the beginning before the introduction of the “lover” but I can only roll my eyes so much
“Very early in my life it was too late.”
Dreamlike writing but got increasingly repetitive, particularly towards the end. The story was intriguing but I wasn’t wowed by the execution. Duras has a wonderful talent for capturing love and desire with words. Despite this, the disjointed structure served only to rupture the narrative and alienate me from the story. Still a compelling read.
Dreamlike writing but got increasingly repetitive, particularly towards the end. The story was intriguing but I wasn’t wowed by the execution. Duras has a wonderful talent for capturing love and desire with words. Despite this, the disjointed structure served only to rupture the narrative and alienate me from the story. Still a compelling read.
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia
No sé si el libro está escrito de esa manera en su idioma original o si fue la traducción (inglesa) pero me encontré perdida muchas veces al leer, los cambios drásticos de temática y situaciones me desorientaron y confundieron hasta el punto en que debía dejar el libro.
En su obra, Duras relata muchas de sus vivencias de adolescencia, su relación con su familia, el pueblo en el cual vivía, las ideas de la época en cuanto al rol femenino y a razas no blancas, y lo que le da nombre al libro: su relación “amorosa” con un hombre chino en sus treinta; y en un comienzo estos temas resultaron interesantes de leer, pero con el paso de las páginas me vi perdiendo interés en continuar la lectura.
En su obra, Duras relata muchas de sus vivencias de adolescencia, su relación con su familia, el pueblo en el cual vivía, las ideas de la época en cuanto al rol femenino y a razas no blancas, y lo que le da nombre al libro: su relación “amorosa” con un hombre chino en sus treinta; y en un comienzo estos temas resultaron interesantes de leer, pero con el paso de las páginas me vi perdiendo interés en continuar la lectura.
gorgeous yet depressing, i’m glad i read it in French as it expands the richness of the prose Duras has so obviously mastered. 4 stars it is!
If you like prose that's written like this, yes, just like this, like this with the many commas and broken-up phrases and repetition, then you will love Duras' The Lover. Elsewise, please avoid. This was not for me. I hated the prose style described above. Despite being a novella, this dragged to the point of torture. Nothing happens and nothing is enjoyable and sometimes that can be well-executed but this just reads like a pretentious arthouse film... which is appropriate, I suppose. There is very little of the lover, actually--mostly just a lot of banging on about her mother and brothers with no new points coming across. If I dig deep perhaps I can draw some thematic merit and parallels between the violence of her mother, her brothers, and her lover, but I don't care enough. There's also the identities she embodies as a would-be writer, foreigner, and a society-deigned whore, which do nothing for me and only seem to be fragments without consolidation. All potential sensuality is nullified by the cold and detached tone she takes which seems like an attempt at shallow profundities. Did not enjoy this at all. Gorgeous cover though, lovely typography.
Quotes:
“The image lasts all the way across.”
“desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it.”
“She’s become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing.”
“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her. It’s up to her to know”
“Already, on the ferry, in advance, the image owed something to this moment.”
“I’d like to eat Hélène 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.”
“The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light.”
“because it wasn’t possible for him to give up this love yet, it was too new, too strong still, too much in its first violence”
“That was the worst. The sunrise, the empty sea, and the decision to abandon the search. The parting.”
“For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. ”
“Suddenly I have a pain. Very slight, almost imperceptible. It’s my heartbeat, shifted into the fresh, keen wound he’s made in me, he, the one who’s talking to me, the one who also made the afternoon’s pleasure. ”
Quotes:
“The image lasts all the way across.”
“desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it.”
“She’s become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing.”
“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her. It’s up to her to know”
“Already, on the ferry, in advance, the image owed something to this moment.”
“I’d like to eat Hélène 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.”
“The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light.”
“because it wasn’t possible for him to give up this love yet, it was too new, too strong still, too much in its first violence”
“That was the worst. The sunrise, the empty sea, and the decision to abandon the search. The parting.”
“For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. ”
“Suddenly I have a pain. Very slight, almost imperceptible. It’s my heartbeat, shifted into the fresh, keen wound he’s made in me, he, the one who’s talking to me, the one who also made the afternoon’s pleasure. ”
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
Duras' most popular work is a product of her own affair with an older man against the humid backdrop of Vietnam, formerly known as French Indochina. It is at the end of the European colonial/imperialist era. Both unnamed lovers are outsiders, the Others. The narrator's encounters with her older lover shape her relationship with Vietnam and with her writing.