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A review by stlake
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
fast-paced
3.75
This book is really challenging to rate.
There are sentences in this book that are so stunning, so profound— about death, about love, about the violent repression that holds White families together. I have to make sure to write down these portions of the text before I return it to the library. Everything “unto death”— probably never written better.
But— I have never winced more while reading something. The racism and colonialism in this book is extreme. On the one hand, one could hope to consider her as doing some critical whiteness— an honest characterization of French imperialism and fetishization of Others. But… I don’t think Duras is actually ‘in on it.’ It’s hard to take her as seriously as her writing is beautiful, because she herself allows for a lot of granted racism in her desire. She never once mentions her lover in another light than the racism that her family allows. She never once speaks of her self-conception as desirable apart from her whiteness and his being Chinese compared to her whiteness.
And— it is a genius way of writing an unbridled consciousness, emerging in the different tenses and associations of a traumatized woman. A woman writing from the fragmented memories of a young girl who knew before anything else that she was a sexual object, perhaps special only through her sexualization which depended upon her youth, her proximity to infancy, her whiteness, her willingness to kill over and over again her mother and brother who abused her. Ugh.
A really tough read. Some literary marvel.
There are sentences in this book that are so stunning, so profound— about death, about love, about the violent repression that holds White families together. I have to make sure to write down these portions of the text before I return it to the library. Everything “unto death”— probably never written better.
But— I have never winced more while reading something. The racism and colonialism in this book is extreme. On the one hand, one could hope to consider her as doing some critical whiteness— an honest characterization of French imperialism and fetishization of Others. But… I don’t think Duras is actually ‘in on it.’ It’s hard to take her as seriously as her writing is beautiful, because she herself allows for a lot of granted racism in her desire. She never once mentions her lover in another light than the racism that her family allows. She never once speaks of her self-conception as desirable apart from her whiteness and his being Chinese compared to her whiteness.
And— it is a genius way of writing an unbridled consciousness, emerging in the different tenses and associations of a traumatized woman. A woman writing from the fragmented memories of a young girl who knew before anything else that she was a sexual object, perhaps special only through her sexualization which depended upon her youth, her proximity to infancy, her whiteness, her willingness to kill over and over again her mother and brother who abused her. Ugh.
A really tough read. Some literary marvel.