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3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
I already want to reread this, in one sitting, which is how it feels like it should be read. As it was, I read it in piecemeal chunks before bed, because life happened to be busy at that particular moment in time. It worked for that, too - light and airy and not too mentally taxing, like wafting through someone else's old family albums.
Duras' prose is the real star here. She could write about a garbage can or a dumpster and probably still fill it with evocative language and incredible emotion. And her life, her incredible, fascinating life. For a book called The Lover, I actually thought the titular romance was the least interesting part of the whole thing. Older men with younger women - it's all so old hat, you know? Which I don't mean as a slight to Duras at all - just that that story has been told in so many different ways, and as someone who was also once a teen girl interested in an older man (which never went anywhere, thankfully!), there's nothing about that situation that intrigues me or appeals to me. The stories of Duras' family, though, were incredible, and I would've gladly read hundreds of more pages on that.
Duras' prose is the real star here. She could write about a garbage can or a dumpster and probably still fill it with evocative language and incredible emotion. And her life, her incredible, fascinating life. For a book called The Lover, I actually thought the titular romance was the least interesting part of the whole thing. Older men with younger women - it's all so old hat, you know? Which I don't mean as a slight to Duras at all - just that that story has been told in so many different ways, and as someone who was also once a teen girl interested in an older man (which never went anywhere, thankfully!), there's nothing about that situation that intrigues me or appeals to me. The stories of Duras' family, though, were incredible, and I would've gladly read hundreds of more pages on that.
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
beautifully written but couldn’t fully get over the ickiness
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“My mother has attacks during which she falls on me, locks me up in my room, punches me, undresses me, comes up to me and smells my body, my underwear, says she can smell the Chinese’s scent, goes even further, looks for suspect stains on my underwear, and shouts, for the whole town to hear, that her daughter’s a prostitute, she’s going to throw her out, she wishes she’d die, no one will have anything to do with her, she’s disgraced, worse than a bitch. ”
A beautifully written story, yet so disturbing. Knowing that this is semi-autobiographical makes it even more tragic.
When i first started reading the book i was so confused by the switches from first to third person. As i read on i realised Duras was trying to highlight the narrator’s lack of identity.
Living as a white girl in Vietnam, the narrator is fetishised by everyone around her. The older man (he’s a pedo) is instantly attracted to her not because he knows her but because she’s white. Even though he’s in the position of power (older and richer than her) he is intimated by her because she is white and therefore he views her as superior. Additionally, she has no one to protect her, her mother is implied to be a bipolar and she is also sexist. The mother is willing to protect her eldest son who is abusive at the expense of her daughter and other son. This turbulent family dynamic makes it easier for her to be groomed by the rich man. She finds financial support from
this man and soon enough the mother and brother begins to view her as a means to an end.
This was such a compelling yet depressing book.
A beautifully written story, yet so disturbing. Knowing that this is semi-autobiographical makes it even more tragic.
When i first started reading the book i was so confused by the switches from first to third person. As i read on i realised Duras was trying to highlight the narrator’s lack of identity.
Living as a white girl in Vietnam, the narrator is fetishised by everyone around her. The older man (he’s a pedo) is instantly attracted to her not because he knows her but because she’s white. Even though he’s in the position of power (older and richer than her) he is intimated by her because she is white and therefore he views her as superior. Additionally, she has no one to protect her, her mother is implied to be a bipolar and she is also sexist. The mother is willing to protect her eldest son who is abusive at the expense of her daughter and other son. This turbulent family dynamic makes it easier for her to be groomed by the rich man. She finds financial support from
this man and soon enough the mother and brother begins to view her as a means to an end.
This was such a compelling yet depressing book.
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.”
So begins Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, an evocative and sensual novel about a young girl’s affair with a man 12 years her senior, which was first published in 1984. I read it back to back with another (supposedly) sensual novel, the (rather horrid) Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, and they couldn’t be further apart — in mood, style or sheer literary power — even though they covered similar (sexual) territory.
The Lover is narrated by Hélène Lagonelle, a 15-year-old French girl looking back on her life in Indochina (now Vietnam) and, in particular, the romance she had with a wealthy Chinese man in 1929. It’s largely based on the author’s own life — she was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to French parents who had emigrated there to work in the French colony. But things did not go well: her father quickly returned to France, where he died soon after, and her mother, a school teacher, made a bad property investment in the colony, which mired them in poverty. Duras also claimed to have been beaten by her mother and her older brother.
In the novel, the narrator, who effortlessly flicks between first and third person, has a strained relationship with her mother, who wants her daughter to do well at school, to get an education and to study mathematics. The daughter does not think she is good at mathematics, but she excels at French and wants to be a writer.
But that’s not the only strain in their relationship. The mother often goes through periods of despair — I suspect an undiagnosed clinical depression — and locks herself away, despondent and unable to properly care for her family. This hardens Hélène, who blames this lack of care for the death of her younger brother, who succumbs to pneumonia, and it also makes her ashamed.
To read my review in full, please visit my blog.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don't look at him either. They can't. They're incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they'd be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society.
There are a plethora of splendid reviews of The Lover by my GR friends. Read those. My own reactions were of a lower cut, more bruised and bottom shelf. I found the novel to be one of shame. Take the girl and her situation, colonials on the down and out. There is a great deal of local color but, the characters find themselves clinging to the short side of the stick. A great poet once said, "I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home." Their failure is malignant. It clings to their clothes and hazes their spoiled breath. I found the erotic to be negligible as well, a clingy despair in contrast to the angelic breasts of the protagonist's schoolmate. There's a wisdom in that, I suppose, however ephemeral. Duras succeeds in making the reader uncomfortable. The framing dynamic is between the older Chinese man and the fifteeen year old protagnist, wry in her man's hat and gold shoes. That relationship is outflanked by the Naturalisti images Duras weaves of Parisian garrets and the familial failures of dissipation.
My year of reading (mostly French) women continues in pace with a philosophy of the here and now. This was a detour of benefit.
There are a plethora of splendid reviews of The Lover by my GR friends. Read those. My own reactions were of a lower cut, more bruised and bottom shelf. I found the novel to be one of shame. Take the girl and her situation, colonials on the down and out. There is a great deal of local color but, the characters find themselves clinging to the short side of the stick. A great poet once said, "I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home." Their failure is malignant. It clings to their clothes and hazes their spoiled breath. I found the erotic to be negligible as well, a clingy despair in contrast to the angelic breasts of the protagonist's schoolmate. There's a wisdom in that, I suppose, however ephemeral. Duras succeeds in making the reader uncomfortable. The framing dynamic is between the older Chinese man and the fifteeen year old protagnist, wry in her man's hat and gold shoes. That relationship is outflanked by the Naturalisti images Duras weaves of Parisian garrets and the familial failures of dissipation.
My year of reading (mostly French) women continues in pace with a philosophy of the here and now. This was a detour of benefit.
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes