Reviews - The Lover | The StoryGraph

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The Lover

Marguerite Duras

3.59 AVERAGE

belogrudovaite's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

"No, something occurred when I was eighteen to make this face happen. It must have been at night. I was afraid of myself, afraid of God. In the daylight I was less afraid, and death seemed less important. But it haunted me all the time. I wanted to kill- my elder brother, I wanted to kill him, to get the better of him for once, just once, and see him die."

The Lover was such a stunning mess of memories that I had the absolute pleasure of reading. This is a short little semi auto-biographical novel about a girl in eccentric clothing from the memories of an old woman. The way Duras weaves through thoughts and memories in the way how you might look back at your life in the dead of night, unable to sleep, where everything is bared. It's all one continuous train of thought, where her family is alive, is dead, where she feels powerful with her older chinese millionaire lover and where she is a child, taken from her body, used. Constantly coming back to these points in life. Where you can feel the depths of her love for her younger brother, the brimming hatred for her older one, and the betrayal she must have felt in regards to their mother. And then circling back around to the man.

The setting of this book is in a time of French colonialism in Vietnam, something I know very little about, but the way Duras wrote it into the setting of the book truly fascinated me, the way she showed the inequality of how the french colonials viewed vietnamese and chinese people.

"She'd wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn't to weep for that kind of lover."

The Lover was so so good. The depth and intricacies and the evils of colonialism and, well, you know, that other thing- absolutely perfectly written, with a bitterness, longing, love, hatred. I bookmarked so many passages in awe of the way they were stitched together. And whenever Duras strayed from her body and told us the story from the third person I just lost my damn mind.

"Our expressions are suddenly changed, false, caught in evil and death."

Content Warnings

eccocosaleggo's review against another edition

3.0

It is rare to find a story told with such delicacy. It is an autobiographical novel, in fact the majority of the facts really happened. The author seems to realize things about her youth by writing about it, the whole book is like a huge reflection. She talks a lot about her family, but by her writing I can feel her struggle in doing this, remembering causes her pain, but she has to get it off her chest to break the chains that bind her to the past. Sometimes she does talk about herself in third person, I think it is because she doesn't fully accept that what happened happened to her. The novel is heart breaking, but not in a dramatic way, by the ending you see that this woman is going to be unhappy her entire life, like she predicted when she was nothing but a little girl. I found that the atmosphere was similar to "Love in the time of cholera", so if you liked that one, definitely give it a try!