The Lover

THE LOVER

by Marguerite Duras

 

Award: PEN/Translation Winner 1986

 

Date Read: April 4, 2022

 

The Lover is a beautiful novella about a first love that’s mistaken as business and a family in turmoil. The no-name nymph is fifteen and experimenting with her own style that she is aware sets her apart from other girls. Her white skin in Vietnam also makes her stand apart. While crossing the Mekong River to her boarding school one day, a rich Chinese man sees her on the ferry and is besotted. He is instantly in love with her.

 

While he is aware she is very young, he cannot help but have her. The girl, aware of the depths of his longing, sees an opportunity to help her family. With no feeling on her part, she offers him her virginity, her body, her time and without her quite realizing it, her heart. Of course, their love affair is not to last as his family will never permit him to marry a white girl and the girl’s family is intent on moving back to France.

 

All of this is set against a turbulent home life for the girl, where she is raised with two older brothers, the eldest of which is evil incarnate. The mother is devoted to her eldest son and turns a blind eye at his gambling, stealing and other unsavory behaviors. She enables him to her dying day and he uses her even beyond her death, stealing the girl’s inheritance.

 

When the girl’s family has set a date to return to France, from that moment on her lover is impotent. He is bereft of her leaving and can no longer perform. Only once she is on the ferry, setting off on her journey does she see his black limousine set away from the pier to watch her leave. As his car slowly recedes in the distance does she cry and recognize that she really did love him all along.

 

A photo of Duras as a young girl, hat and all, paints a vivid picture of the vibrancy of the girl’s youth and the depth of her sorrow – the premature aging – experienced as the loss of her lover. Written in a minimalist style, the book is said to portray an affair that Duras experienced as a young girl in Indochina.

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