THE LOVER
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THE LOVER
“Very early in my life, it was too late.”
And so begins Marguerite Duras’ 1984 novel The Lover, a magical romp chronicling the love affair of a fifteen-year-old French girl with an elegant Chinese man in his late twenties.
The novel pulses with the heat of forbidden romance, and yet eludes its starry-eyed sentiments. A sense of resignation consumes the entire book; she has chosen him because their love is destined to die.
A bit of backstory
Marguerite Duras wrote The Lover when she was seventy years old, traveling back to her childhood in French-colonized Indochina, now Vietnam.
Fact blurs with myth in Duras’ nonlinear, experimental prose. To this day, it is unknown what’s true, what’s not. But the one who got away provided ample inspiration throughout the years.
The 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, follows a Frenchwoman’s sensual encounters with a Japanese architect in the aftermath of World War II. Duras wrote the screenplay, which received a nomination for an Academy Award.
In the 90s, Jean-Jacques Annaud sought to adapt The Lover to film. Duras was initially recruited for the project, but left due to creative differences with the director. Later, she wrote The North China Lover to reclaim her story and probably correct the lapses of her previous novel.
After all, in spite of its commercial and critical success, Duras did not care for The Lover, saying: “It’s an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.”
Marguerite Duras was
a drunkard, a socialist activist against the Nazis, a patron saint for misunderstood women driven by hunger and desire, and one of the best writers of the twentieth century. Her myth looms larger-than-life, but The Lover shows that she was once simply a girl in an inhospitable world, thirsty for knowledge and desiring distraction and deliverance from the monotony of everyday life and the repetitive, boring anxieties of her dysfunctional family.
A universal experience for all fifteen-year-old girls, am I right?
What we love about it
Duras elevates and eviscerates the trope of forbidden romance. The nameless heroine’s love affair with the man from Cholon is brutal, cynical and messy.
He picks her up in his black limousine in broad daylight at her all-white girls boarding school; he pays for dinner at a restaurant with her mother and brothers, even as the latter refuse to speak to him; her mother disapproves of the relationship but looks the other way, because he’s rich and gives her pretty gifts; he weeps at her indifference to romantic feelings, and she remains indifferent.
Sometimes, messy is perfect.
At the heart of the novel are the crystal-blue rivers, torrid monsoons and lush green forests of Vietnam. It’s precisely the force of this beauty which entails all its violence. And upholding the aesthetic order of centuries-long tradition means never relenting to the spontaneous impulses of the heart, but going on with life just the same.
Stylish? Iconic.
In the humid days and sensuous nights of Indochina, a woman’s value rests foremost in her beauty and projection of desirability. ‘She’ and ‘I’—forever unnamed—knows this, as she wears a “threadbare, almost transparent” dress of real red silk, sparkly gold lamé heels, and a final touch: a “broad-brimmed”, fedora hat with a big black ribbon.
The outfit is a glamour and disguise at the same time, designed to attract and repel. It’s this outfit she wears on the ferry when the man from Cholon notices her for the first and last time.
Written by Iman Sultan
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