Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)
Author of The Lover
About the Author
Marguerite Duras was born in Gia-Dinh, Indochina on April 4, 1914. After attending school in Saigon, she moved to Paris, France to study law and political science. After graduation, she worked as a secretary in the French Ministry of the Colonies until 1941. During World War II, she joined the show more Resistance and published her first books. After the liberation, she became a member of the French Communist Party, and though she later resigned, she always described herself as a Marxist. Her first book, Les Impudents, was published in 1943. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 70 novels, plays, screenplays and adaptations. Her novels include The Sea Wall, The Lover, The Lover from Northern China, The War, and That's All. In 1959, she wrote her first film scenario, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and has since been involved in a number of other films, including India Song, Baxter, Vera Baxter, Le Camion (The Truck), and The Lover. She died on March 4, 1996 at the age of 81. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Marguerite Duras - Modernista
Works by Marguerite Duras
Four Novels: The Square / Moderato Cantabile / 10:30 on a Summer Night / The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (1965) 331 copies, 3 reviews
Trilogy: "The Square", "Ten-thirty on a Summer Night", " Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas" (Calderbooks) (1977) 15 copies
Oeuvres Completes in two voulmes (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) (French Edition) (2011) 10 copies
Marguerite Duras Coffret Oeuvres Completes III, IV : 1974-1995 [Bibliotheque de la Pleiade] (French Edition) (2014) 7 copies
Stilla liv 2 copies
DHIMBJA 2 copies
L'Amant - Un Barrage contre le Pacifique - Moderato cantabile - Dix heures et demie du soir en été - Hiroshima mon amour - La Douleur - Emily L. (2015) 2 copies
L'amant De La Chine Du Nord, Audio CD Lu Par Ariane Ascaride (1 CD MP3) (French Edition) (Écoutez lire) (2014) 1 copy
Người tình 1 copy
Ach, Ernesto! 1 copy
Il dolore 1 copy
O AMANTE 1 copy
A DOR 1 copy
Maderato cantabile 1958 1 copy
India Song 1973 1 copy
Los Antilopes 1 copy
Il Dolore 1 copy
L' Amant De La Chine Du Nord 1 copy
O Ver©Đo de 80 1 copy
O vice-cônsul 1 copy
The Bible [short story] 1 copy
Case di scrittori 1 copy
Caprice 1 copy
Les Enfants 1 copy
Duras, Marguerite Archive 1 copy
Ruya ve Kader 1 copy
A dor 1 copy
le navire 1 copy
Baxter Vera Baxter (DVD) 1 copy
Os insolentes 1 copy
Perlouses set 2x 13+14+15 1 copy
La pluie d' 1 copy
Pisati 1 copy
Bir Kış Günü Öğleden Sonra 1 copy
Viết 1 copy
Parkta 1 copy
Fiche de lecture L'Amant de Marguerite Duras (Analyse littéraire de référence et résumé complet) (French Edition) (2017) 1 copy
The War Years 1 copy
Hmatatelný život 1 copy
עיניים כחולות שיער שחור 1 copy
Associated Works
Profil d'une oeuvre : Un barrage contre le Pacifique, 1950, Marguerite Duras (1996) — Contributor — 2 copies
10x passie-vrouwen vertellen — Contributor — 1 copy
Gefährliche Ferien - Bretagne und Atlantikküste: mit Martin Walker und vielen anderen (detebe) (2019) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Duras, Marguerite
- Legal name
- Donnadieu, Marguerite Germaine Marie
- Birthdate
- 1914-04-04
- Date of death
- 1996-03-03
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Sorbonne University (1936|DES|1937)
- Occupations
- novelist
film director
screenwriter
playwright
essayist - Organizations
- French Communist Party
- Awards and honors
- Prix Goncourt (1984)
Prix Ritz Paris Hemingway (1986)
Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1989)
Prix de Mai (1958)
Prix de la Tribune de Paris (1962)
Prix Jean-Cocteau (1976) (show all 7)
Grand prix du théâtre de l'Académie française (1983) - Relationships
- Antelme, Robert (husband)
Mascolo, Dionys (husband) - Short biography
- Marguerite Duras was the pen name of Marguerite Donnadieu, born in Gia Dinh, French Indochina (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) to Marie and Henri Donnadieu, teachers from France. In 1933, she went to France for her higher education. After completing studies at the Sorbonne in political science and law, she became a member of the French Communist Party (she would later be expelled). In the late 1930s, she worked for the French Ministry of the Colonies. During World War II, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers, a de facto book-censorship system, but also was a member of the French Resistance. In 1942, for the publication of her first novel, she chose Duras as her pen name for a village where her late father's house was located. Her career as an avant-garde writer took off in the 1950s with works such as Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 1950).
She was a prolific writer of plays, novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, with many of her works marked by feelings of alienation. She returned often to the theme of love between people of different races. Her semi-autobiographical novel L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), about her youth in Indochina, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. - Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Gia Định, French Cochinchina
- Places of residence
- Gia Định, French Cochinchina (birth ∙ now Vietnam)
Paris, Île-de-France, France - Place of death
- 6e arrondissement, Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Burial location
- Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Map Location
- France
Members
Discussions
1914: Marguerite Duras - Resources and General Discussion in Literary Centennials (September 2015)
Duras: The Sea Wall in Author Theme Reads (January 2014)
1914: Duras - India Song in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - The Sailor from Gibraltar in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - Hiroshima Mon Amour in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
1914: Duras - The Sea Wall in Literary Centennials (January 2014)
Duras: Plays and Films in Author Theme Reads (December 2013)
Marguerite Duras: General Thread in Author Theme Reads (August 2013)
Duras: The Lover in Author Theme Reads (August 2013)
Duras: The North China Lover in Author Theme Reads (July 2013)
Reviews
A tropikus Indokína – tudom, milyen az. Tegnap egy légkondícionálás nélküli, zárt ablakos BKV buszon kezdtem el ezt a könyvet. Ez az a háttér, ami párával és fülledséggel homályosítja el ennek az amúgy igazán tárgyilagos szövegnek a kontúrjait. A kisregény elbeszélője a család konvencionális, zárt poklából szökik ki azzal, hogy a közeg létező összes tabuját felborogatja: gyermeklányként egy gazdag férfi szeretőjévé válik, aki ráadásul még show more kínai is. Hogy ezt nem pénzért, hanem szexuális vágyainak engedve teszi, alighanem még megbocsáthatatlanabbá teszi választását a konzervatív női szerephagyomány tükrében. (Az pedig, hogy mindezt meg is írja – hát csak hab a tortán.) De vajon mi történik, ha kilépünk a megszokott pokolból? Értelmezhető-e ez felszabadulásként a szó bármely értelmében, vagy csak exportáljuk privát poklunkat valaki más életébe? Ez a sűrű, tömény szöveg meghagyja nekem a lehetőséget, hogy megválaszoljam magamnak a kérdést. Tulajdonképpen olyan, mint azok a fotók, ahol nem az ábrázolt személy a lényeg – hanem az, ami lemaradt a képről. show less
As with the other book I've read by Marguerite Duras, I was captivated by the language and ideas in this slim novel, but I'm not quite sure I understood it. The best I can say in terms of what it's "about" is that it takes place in 1980, when Duras begins a passionate relationship with a much younger man, the eponymous Yann Andrea Steiner. They are in a beachside town. Time begins to swirl and Duras also watches a teenage summer camp counselor and her relationship with a six year old boy. In show more this story line, it is 1944, they are both Jewish, and the little boy has witnessed the shooting of his toddler sister by the Germans and also the suicide of his parents. Their relationship is troubling because there is a sexual nature to it.
It's a brief book, and I don't think the reader is meant to get caught up in the details of understanding the plot or time. Instead it's a look at two parallel relationships of people far apart in age connecting, beautiful writing, and a glimpse into an interesting author's mind. I enjoyed it. show less
It's a brief book, and I don't think the reader is meant to get caught up in the details of understanding the plot or time. Instead it's a look at two parallel relationships of people far apart in age connecting, beautiful writing, and a glimpse into an interesting author's mind. I enjoyed it. show less
I can feel a Marguerite Duras fixation coming on.
While fairly impressed with her late novel L'amant de la Chine du nord, I wasn't completely drawn into Duras's milieu until David and I watched Hiroshima mon amour, the 1959 Alain Resnais film for which she wrote the screenplay. To put it bluntly, Hiroshima mon amour blew. me. away. The opening sequence reduced me to sobs, overlaying Emmanuelle Riva's and Eiji Okada's stark, dreamlike narration (a stylized argument, which at times seems almost show more to veer into poetic verse, about whether or not Riva's character has or has not "seen" the devastation of Hiroshima) with footage of said devastation and of the hospital and museum Riva's character mentions. And the film as a whole raised fascinating questions about authenticity, storytelling, trauma, and the ability of humans to connect and empathize. Since Duras' 1964 novella Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein shares many of these same preoccupations, I thought I would attempt to write about them together, even though I know that I will be overwhelmed with material!
Both Hiroshima and Ravissement, then, are deeply concerned with the extent to which it is (im)possible to step inside another person's experience. In the opening scene of the film, Riva's character (known simply as "elle" or "her") makes a repeated claim to have witnessed the events of nuclear devastation in Hiroshima, not at first hand but through visits to bomb victims in the hospital, trips to the museum, and viewings of the newsreels. As she amplifies on her experiences, speaking in mesmerizing circuits of repeated words, Eiji Okada's character "lui"/"him" occasionally interrupts her to deny her authority: "Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima." ("You saw nothing at Hiroshima.") So did she? It's a complicated question. On one hand, some of her claims are quite radical:
Obviously, this Frenchwoman can only "know" that the temperature in Peace Square reached ten thousand degrees in the way one knows a fact from a history textbook: with her brain rather than her body. Likewise there is a world of difference between visiting an interpretive museum exhibit, even an extremely well-constructed one, and "knowing" an event through first-hand knowledge either personal or cultural. On the other hand, her empathy just as obviously exceeds the theoretical: watching those newsreels and museum exhibits really has imbued her with some part of the horror of the situation. In fact, as a viewer watching the scenes of devastation ourselves, we are in the exact same situation. Resnais and Duras make us question Elle's claims to understanding, even as they put us in an extreme position of identification with her. After all, if I am sobbing as I watch this film (which I was), how can I fully dismiss the power of simulacrums to convey experience? As she herself acknowledges later on, we as outside observers are limited in our ability to both feel and act: "On peut toujours se moquer. Mais que peut faire d'autre un touriste, que justement pleurer?" / "You can always scoff. But what else can a tourist do, but weep?" Later on in the film, Riva's character is possessive about her own traumatic war-time experience; her Japanese lover can listen and feel pain, but he can't truly understand.
Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, too, questions the ability of any person to tell the story of another's trauma—or even to claim absolute certainty about what that trauma was in the first place. Lola Valerie Stein (self-styled Lol V.) remains a cypher throughout the novella, which is narrated by her eventual lover, Jacques Hold. Jacques meets Lol through another lover of his, Tatiana Karl, an old school friend of Lol's who was present on the night, ten years before, which directly preceded Lol's mental breakdown. Exactly what precipitated this breakdown remains a subject of contention throughout the novella: while it's clear that Lol and her fiancé both met an older woman that night, and that the fiancé left with said woman as dawn was breaking, Lol's emotions at each step of the evening are puzzling, as is her present relationship to the past. For example, Tatiana recalls that for most of the dance Lol didn't seem to mind her fiancé being enamored of another woman, sitting calmly throughout the evening until the couple left the ballroom without her. Was she ever in love with her fiancé? Was she in love with the woman who replaced her in his affections? Was she in love with some mental image of the couple together, and herself as an observer of their love? Was she teetering on the brink of mental disaster the whole time, and this night was merely the straw that broke the camel's back of her mind?
Tatiana is invested in one version of past events, and Lol—uncommunicative, shocky, and prone to telling bizarre, easily-detectable lies—is of little use as a witness. Jacques himself is all too aware of his inability to fathom Lol's inner world; not only was he not present on the famous night of the ball, but Tatiana, who was there, disagrees about whether it's even the crucial event in Lol's past. She feels that Lol has always been missing some crucial component, that her "self" has always been somehow absent, and that the seeds of her breakdown were present since long before the night at T. Beach.
Thus not only do we have competing accounts of what happened inside Lol while she watched her fiancé fall for another woman, we have a debate about whether it even matters. Tatiana and Jacques are also unsure of the degree to which Lol has recovered from her breakdown: the slick surfaces of her immaculately-maintained home and marriage seem to indicate "recovery," yet Tatiana at least is invested in the idea of Lol's continuing malady. And what is that malady in the first place? It becomes clear that Lol is, for some reason and in some way, obsessed with her past, but what is she remembering and experiencing when she thinks of it?
This brings up another commonality between Ravissement and Hiroshima, which is a preoccupation with memory and forgetting, and the pain involved in inevitably forgetting something one had sworn to remember. In the film, Riva's character gestures at this idea with the statement
But the inability to forget—or more accurately, the ability to never forget, to remember forever, is just that: an illusion. Even as these characters are haunted by an inescapable relationship to their past traumas (to the point where several people identify each other as synonymous with those traumas), what dwells inside them is not precisely "memory" but an ever-changing set of reference points combining past, present, potential and imaginary. When Lol moves back to the town of S. Tahla after ten years away, for example, her memories of the town seem to start out sharp, not having been added to much in the intervening years, but soon they become eroded through frequent applications of new experience.
Thus being back in her home town erodes Lol's past knowledge of it, just as she seems unable to see again the shapes of her past self and her former fiancé when she revisits T. Beach at the end of the novel. Her attempts to reenact the past with a new cast of characters, and force it to provide her with something that was missing the first time around, are dream-like and fascinating, asking similar questions and evoking a similar mood to the relationship between "Elle" and "Lui" in Hiroshima mon amour. I am eager to read more Duras from this period; where should I start? Moderato Cantabile? L'après-midi de M. Andesmas? Recommendations very much welcome. In the meantime, both Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein and Hiroshima mon amour come very highly recommended. show less
While fairly impressed with her late novel L'amant de la Chine du nord, I wasn't completely drawn into Duras's milieu until David and I watched Hiroshima mon amour, the 1959 Alain Resnais film for which she wrote the screenplay. To put it bluntly, Hiroshima mon amour blew. me. away. The opening sequence reduced me to sobs, overlaying Emmanuelle Riva's and Eiji Okada's stark, dreamlike narration (a stylized argument, which at times seems almost show more to veer into poetic verse, about whether or not Riva's character has or has not "seen" the devastation of Hiroshima) with footage of said devastation and of the hospital and museum Riva's character mentions. And the film as a whole raised fascinating questions about authenticity, storytelling, trauma, and the ability of humans to connect and empathize. Since Duras' 1964 novella Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein shares many of these same preoccupations, I thought I would attempt to write about them together, even though I know that I will be overwhelmed with material!
Both Hiroshima and Ravissement, then, are deeply concerned with the extent to which it is (im)possible to step inside another person's experience. In the opening scene of the film, Riva's character (known simply as "elle" or "her") makes a repeated claim to have witnessed the events of nuclear devastation in Hiroshima, not at first hand but through visits to bomb victims in the hospital, trips to the museum, and viewings of the newsreels. As she amplifies on her experiences, speaking in mesmerizing circuits of repeated words, Eiji Okada's character "lui"/"him" occasionally interrupts her to deny her authority: "Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima." ("You saw nothing at Hiroshima.") So did she? It's a complicated question. On one hand, some of her claims are quite radical:
J'ai eu chaud, Place de la Paix. Dix mille degrés sur la Place de la Paix. Je le sais. La temperature du soleil sur la Place de la Paix - comment l'ignorer?
I was hot in Peace Square. Ten thousand degrees in Peace Square. I know it. The temperature of the sun in Peace Square - how could you not know it?
Obviously, this Frenchwoman can only "know" that the temperature in Peace Square reached ten thousand degrees in the way one knows a fact from a history textbook: with her brain rather than her body. Likewise there is a world of difference between visiting an interpretive museum exhibit, even an extremely well-constructed one, and "knowing" an event through first-hand knowledge either personal or cultural. On the other hand, her empathy just as obviously exceeds the theoretical: watching those newsreels and museum exhibits really has imbued her with some part of the horror of the situation. In fact, as a viewer watching the scenes of devastation ourselves, we are in the exact same situation. Resnais and Duras make us question Elle's claims to understanding, even as they put us in an extreme position of identification with her. After all, if I am sobbing as I watch this film (which I was), how can I fully dismiss the power of simulacrums to convey experience? As she herself acknowledges later on, we as outside observers are limited in our ability to both feel and act: "On peut toujours se moquer. Mais que peut faire d'autre un touriste, que justement pleurer?" / "You can always scoff. But what else can a tourist do, but weep?" Later on in the film, Riva's character is possessive about her own traumatic war-time experience; her Japanese lover can listen and feel pain, but he can't truly understand.
Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, too, questions the ability of any person to tell the story of another's trauma—or even to claim absolute certainty about what that trauma was in the first place. Lola Valerie Stein (self-styled Lol V.) remains a cypher throughout the novella, which is narrated by her eventual lover, Jacques Hold. Jacques meets Lol through another lover of his, Tatiana Karl, an old school friend of Lol's who was present on the night, ten years before, which directly preceded Lol's mental breakdown. Exactly what precipitated this breakdown remains a subject of contention throughout the novella: while it's clear that Lol and her fiancé both met an older woman that night, and that the fiancé left with said woman as dawn was breaking, Lol's emotions at each step of the evening are puzzling, as is her present relationship to the past. For example, Tatiana recalls that for most of the dance Lol didn't seem to mind her fiancé being enamored of another woman, sitting calmly throughout the evening until the couple left the ballroom without her. Was she ever in love with her fiancé? Was she in love with the woman who replaced her in his affections? Was she in love with some mental image of the couple together, and herself as an observer of their love? Was she teetering on the brink of mental disaster the whole time, and this night was merely the straw that broke the camel's back of her mind?
Tatiana is invested in one version of past events, and Lol—uncommunicative, shocky, and prone to telling bizarre, easily-detectable lies—is of little use as a witness. Jacques himself is all too aware of his inability to fathom Lol's inner world; not only was he not present on the famous night of the ball, but Tatiana, who was there, disagrees about whether it's even the crucial event in Lol's past. She feels that Lol has always been missing some crucial component, that her "self" has always been somehow absent, and that the seeds of her breakdown were present since long before the night at T. Beach.
Je lui ai demandé si la crise de Lol, plus tard, ne lui avait pas apporté la preuve qu'elle se trompait. Elle m'a répeté que non, qu'elle, elle croyait que cette crise et Lol ne faisaient qu'un depuis toujours.
Je ne crois plus à rien de ce que dit Tatiana, je ne suis convaincu de rien.
I asked her if Lol's breakdown, later on, didn't prove to her that she had been wrong. She repeated that no, that she, she believed that this attack and Lol had always been one.
I no longer believe in anything Tatiana says, I'm not convinced of anything.
Thus not only do we have competing accounts of what happened inside Lol while she watched her fiancé fall for another woman, we have a debate about whether it even matters. Tatiana and Jacques are also unsure of the degree to which Lol has recovered from her breakdown: the slick surfaces of her immaculately-maintained home and marriage seem to indicate "recovery," yet Tatiana at least is invested in the idea of Lol's continuing malady. And what is that malady in the first place? It becomes clear that Lol is, for some reason and in some way, obsessed with her past, but what is she remembering and experiencing when she thinks of it?
This brings up another commonality between Ravissement and Hiroshima, which is a preoccupation with memory and forgetting, and the pain involved in inevitably forgetting something one had sworn to remember. In the film, Riva's character gestures at this idea with the statement
De même que dans l'amour, cette illusion existe, cette illusion de pouvoir jamais oublier, de même j'ai eu l'illusion devant Hiroshima, que jamais je n'oublierai. De même que dans l'amour.
Just as in love, this illusion exists, this illusion of never being able to forget, I had the illusion when confronted with Hiroshima, that I would never forget it. Just as in love.
But the inability to forget—or more accurately, the ability to never forget, to remember forever, is just that: an illusion. Even as these characters are haunted by an inescapable relationship to their past traumas (to the point where several people identify each other as synonymous with those traumas), what dwells inside them is not precisely "memory" but an ever-changing set of reference points combining past, present, potential and imaginary. When Lol moves back to the town of S. Tahla after ten years away, for example, her memories of the town seem to start out sharp, not having been added to much in the intervening years, but soon they become eroded through frequent applications of new experience.
[E]lle commença à reconnaître moins, puis différement, elle commença à retourner jour après jour, pas à pas vers son ignorance de S. Tahla.
Cet endroit du monde où on croit qu'elle a vécu sa douleur passée, cette prétendue douleur, s'efface peu à peu de sa mémoire dans sa matérialité. Pourquoi ces lieux plutôt que d'autres? En quelque point qu'elle s'y trouve Lol y est comment une première fois. De la distance invariable du souvenir elle de dispose plus: elle est là. Sa présence fait la ville pure, méconnaissable. Elle commence à marcher dans le palais fastueux de l'oubli de S. Tahla.
She began to recognize less, then differently, she began to return day after day, step by step towards her ignorance of S. Tahla.
This spot in the world where they say she lived her past grief, this alleged grief, is little by little erased from her memory by her corporeality. Why these places rather than others? Wherever Lol finds herself, it is as though she is there for the first time. She no longer positions herself at the unvarying remove of memory: she is there. Her presence renders the city pure, unknowable. She begins to walk in the sumptuous palace of forgetting S. Tahla.
Thus being back in her home town erodes Lol's past knowledge of it, just as she seems unable to see again the shapes of her past self and her former fiancé when she revisits T. Beach at the end of the novel. Her attempts to reenact the past with a new cast of characters, and force it to provide her with something that was missing the first time around, are dream-like and fascinating, asking similar questions and evoking a similar mood to the relationship between "Elle" and "Lui" in Hiroshima mon amour. I am eager to read more Duras from this period; where should I start? Moderato Cantabile? L'après-midi de M. Andesmas? Recommendations very much welcome. In the meantime, both Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein and Hiroshima mon amour come very highly recommended. show less
“Very early in my life it was too late.”
and
“Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.”
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third show more persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve not seen (Source.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old “man from Cholon” after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
“He breathes her in, the child…
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished…
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up…
I became his child.”
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert’s deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
“How can innocence be disgraced?”
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (Source.)
In 18 months, they don’t talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong “Love... in its first violence”!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras’ interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
• When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
• She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
• She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
• But she also writes that she’s “where she has to be, placed here”, which sounds like less of a choice.
• Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
“She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.”
Ambiguous Truth
“The story of my life does not exist.”
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 “that might have been taken”, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for “crucial ambiguity”. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
• “The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour” and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.”
• “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
• “When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.”
• “Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death… the mysterious death of lovers without love.”
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who’ve had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family’s acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings. show less
and
“Death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened.”
The first, very striking quote, is on the opening page. Like the second quote, it teases about horrors not yet explained - that may never be.
Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novella over a few months around her 70th birthday. The narrative is dreamy and disjointed. Her family is damaged and disjointed. She slips between first and third show more persons, tenses, and sheets. The main characters are nameless, and pronouns sometimes ambiguous.
I collected the shiny tesserae, gradually constructing patches of story. Some fit tightly, others less so, There’s an erotic diversion to describe the innocently irresistible body of a schoolmate, Hélène Lagonelle. You could almost read the snippets in any order (like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE).
Image: Scene on the ferry, from the 1992 film, which I’ve not seen (Source.)
The pages exude the heat and humidity of French Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1929. Soporific fever drives lust and hormones. Desperation changes standards. Taboos are breached.
The writing is beautiful, but there are constant allusions to fear, madness, and murder. A powerful dissonance.
The crux of the story is a relationship she had as a 15-year old with a 27-year old “man from Cholon” after an encounter on a ferry. She is white (French) but from an impoverished, dysfunctional, fatherless family. He is rich, but Chinese. Race, class, and wealth should keep them apart. And age.
I was captivated by the mysterious undercurrents of a broken family, and the lifelong ripples from a chance encounter on a mundane river crossing. A metaphor for the whole story. A child becomes an adult in an instant.
Red Flags
“He breathes her in, the child…
It’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished…
It launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up…
I became his child.”
It seems unfair to compare this very personal piece to Lolita (see my review HERE), but I think one must. Although Duras' story takes place long before Nabokov's, she wrote it long after, and must have known of it. Like Lolita, the strange beauty of Duras' language lures one into a distasteful story of an abused child.
This teenager is also a vulnerable, immature, tomboy - albeit not as knowing as Lolita is portrayed. But we only see Lolita through Humbert’s deluded self-justifying eyes, whereas in The Lover, the author is describing herself, making peace with her past.
The more shocking aspect here, is that her mother and older brothers are fully aware of what’s going on. They permit, enable, and defend it.
“How can innocence be disgraced?”
So asks her mother, when her daughter’s relationship is challenged.
Everyone (the girl, the man from Cholon, her family) acknowledges that she doesn’t - and won’t ever - love him, though he claims to love her. Her family enjoy lavish meals and financial benefits, though won’t even talk to the man himself. This is child prostitution!
Image: Woman waving a red flag (Source.)
In 18 months, they don’t talk about themselves, let alone their future. She likes the idea of his having other women, which raises questions about her own self-esteem.
The man is a victim of sorts, ruled by fear, especially of his father, and looked down on by colonials because of his skin. But he is an adult, wanting to avoid, or at least delay, a suitable marriage, so that he can prolong “Love... in its first violence”!
Ambiguous Morality
Duras’ interpretation of the relationship is cloudy and contradictory:
• When writing of her most vulnerable times, she sometimes switches to third person, as if distancing her adult self from her younger self.
• She makes the point that the inequality of age and wealth were counterbalanced by inequality of race.
• She writes (with hindsight) that she immediately realised her power over him, and that the choice was hers alone.
• But she also writes that she’s “where she has to be, placed here”, which sounds like less of a choice.
• Most unsettlingly, of losing her virginity to this man, she says - in the third person:
“She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire.”
Ambiguous Truth
“The story of my life does not exist.”
Duras provokes the reader on this point. Photos are a small, recurring, and significant trope. In particular, she muses on a non-existent one: a photo of herself, aged 15 “that might have been taken”, but wasn’t. In it, her clothes were chosen for “crucial ambiguity”. The reader wonders what would (not) have happened if she’d caught a different ferry that day. If perhaps she actually did?
However, long before she wrote this, Duras wrote another, semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, in 1950. It presents a similar picture, but notably different in other ways. See Jim's excellent review here.
It would be easier to think this story is fiction, but evidently the general narrative is true. Tragedy.
Quotes
• “The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour” and at night “the light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.”
• “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
• “When I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams.”
• “Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death… the mysterious death of lovers without love.”
Conclusion
This is a brilliant piece of writing, but not at all what I expected. There are far more mentions of fear, madness, and death than of love or even passion.
It is more disturbing - or should be - than expected. I have friends, and have read of others, who’ve had under-age age-gap relationships like this and sworn they were positive milestones. One couple are still together after 35+ years. What sets this apart for me, is the family’s acceptance of the financial aspect.
The writing is 5*, the subject is awful. Averaging to 3*.
Given the very fragmentary, non-chronological telling, and the fact it’s barely 100 pages, it’s best read in one or two sittings. show less
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