The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
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Description
An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, show more and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective?that of a visitor to Vietnam today. show lessTags
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JuliaMaria dieselbe Geschichte noch einmal erzählt
SCPeterson From the nymphet's perspective
Cecilturtle une éducation semblable bien que les choix soient différents
Member 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 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.) show more 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
Marguerite Duras' style hasn't sat well with me in the past (I couldn't fathom "Hiroshima Mon Amour"), but it's eerily effective here at transmitting the pain of memories too delicate to examine closely, too powerful to be ignored. It's a short work but not easily penetrated; my way was greatly eased for having seen the movie adaptation.
French-occupied southeast Asia, pre-WWII: a young French girl enters a liaison with a wealthy Chinese man. I thought I knew this story, but the novel goes considerably more in-depth with the girl's family. As semi-autobiography, it felt like the author was recalling scattered images in hopes of piecing together a whole picture that explained how she survived such a chaotic life. Some memories seem almost show more incidental, e.g. running from the madwoman - unless taken symbolically. She flees the madwoman at age eight as she would flee the threat of descending into madness herself almost ten years later. Her own mother is mentally unwell, there is little about her family that is normal, and she has nothing to cling to and no one to rely on. Her lover offers some respite, though he is hardly a refuge. She revels in their shared moments together, but perceives his weakness and feels no protection.
The movie led me to believe this was a story primarily about mistaking love's identity, not recognizing it until too late. The novel is something more complex, portraying the basking in another's proffered love as grasping at a tenuous lifeline, a means of survival. show less
French-occupied southeast Asia, pre-WWII: a young French girl enters a liaison with a wealthy Chinese man. I thought I knew this story, but the novel goes considerably more in-depth with the girl's family. As semi-autobiography, it felt like the author was recalling scattered images in hopes of piecing together a whole picture that explained how she survived such a chaotic life. Some memories seem almost show more incidental, e.g. running from the madwoman - unless taken symbolically. She flees the madwoman at age eight as she would flee the threat of descending into madness herself almost ten years later. Her own mother is mentally unwell, there is little about her family that is normal, and she has nothing to cling to and no one to rely on. Her lover offers some respite, though he is hardly a refuge. She revels in their shared moments together, but perceives his weakness and feels no protection.
The movie led me to believe this was a story primarily about mistaking love's identity, not recognizing it until too late. The novel is something more complex, portraying the basking in another's proffered love as grasping at a tenuous lifeline, a means of survival. show less
THE LOVER, a novel by Marguerite Duras, is a book I've had on my to-read list ever since I read a review of the film adaptation more than twenty years ago. The book is probably autobiographical fiction, since I have read that almost all of Duras's books are based on her own life. The book was first published in 1984 and Duras died in 1996.
While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than show more fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.
The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.
But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -
"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..."
Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."
One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple -
"... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."
Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than show more fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.
The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.
But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -
"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..."
Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."
One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple -
"... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."
Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
The Lover is a novel rooted in time and place. The time is the era between the two World Wars, and the place is French Indochina. The lovers are a fifteen year old French girl and a twenty-eight year old Chinese man. The affair is known to both families and to the girl's school.
No one made an effort to stop it. The Chinese lover did attempt to legalize things by marrying the girl, but was repeatedly refused permission by his millionaire father, as adamantly opposed to what was considered a mixed marriage as was the French ruling class.
It is the girl who narrates the story years later. Although young when it all happened, she seemed to have the knowledge of the ages when it came to men and women, to have been born with it. She tell us
The girl was alone in Saigon, attending French high school and staying at a boarding school. She had met the young man on a ferry crossing the Mekong. Emerging from his limousine, he approached the waif/seductress .
This sense of inevitability, of doom, of loss, pervades the novel. Even the river on which they are travelling signals this.
The girl's mother will first lose her house across the river in Cambodia, and years later will lose her final home in France to pay the gambling debts of her older son who has lost the family's money. The girl's younger brother will lose his life to pneumonia during the Japanese occupation. Even colour is lost, annihilated by the strength of the sun.
The connections between the lover and the girl is fragile. It only exists in the room to which he takes her each day after school. It cannot survive outside the room. When the girl has him take her and her brothers on expensive outings, they barely communicate until they are safe once more in their room.
Although the man believes he is desperately in love with the girl, she has no such illusions about him. This gives the reader a somewhat queasy feeling, as the fifteen year old rationalizes her relationship with the wealthy young man, fully believing that in just such ways will she continue to survive in the future. There is no compassion for the young man; perhaps a certain sense of comfort, even comraderie, but none of the passion he feels as he constantly weeps over her. Later, she speaks of the relationship as incestuous, with herself as the child and the lover as the father. There are other hints at incest. Her older brother is always spoken of as the murderer of her mother and younger brother. While not directly the case, he does exert a sinister control over them, which the girl says she has escaped.
The girl is capable of love and passion though. One of the few named people in the novel is her seventeen year old schoolmate Hélène Lagonelle. The girl obsessed over Hélène "...the most beautiful of all things given by God... I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle" However, Hélène was a simple soul, incapable of learning past primary school, unaware of the desire she aroused. One day the girl returned to school to find that she had lost Hélène too, the one person she cared about.
Eventually the girl was taken out of school to be sent to France. The affair ended, a new life began; a life related in the impersonal third person.
There is a dream like feeling throughout this highly autobiographical novel, a feeling of alternately floating and being submerged, which I suspect is even more powerful in the original French. Marguerite Duras was born in Indochina and did have an affair with a Chinese man. She moved to France as a young woman. She revisited and rewrote this affair many times throughout her life, publishing this version from the perspective of an older woman when she was seventy. It won the Prix Goncourt. show less
No one made an effort to stop it. The Chinese lover did attempt to legalize things by marrying the girl, but was repeatedly refused permission by his millionaire father, as adamantly opposed to what was considered a mixed marriage as was the French ruling class.
It is the girl who narrates the story years later. Although young when it all happened, she seemed to have the knowledge of the ages when it came to men and women, to have been born with it. She tell us
Atshow more
the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. My mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me -- with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience.
The girl was alone in Saigon, attending French high school and staying at a boarding school. She had met the young man on a ferry crossing the Mekong. Emerging from his limousine, he approached the waif/seductress .
From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he's at her mercy. And therefore that others besides him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises. She knows something else too, that the time has now probably come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this nor her brothers. She knows this now too. As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she's excluded from the family for the first time and forever. From now on they will no longer know what becomes of her. Whether she's taken away from them, carried off, wounded, spoiled, they will no longer know. Neither her mother nor her brothers. That is their fate henceforth. It's already enough to make you weep, here in the black limousine.
Now the child will have to reckon only with this man, the first, the one who introduced himself on the ferry.
This sense of inevitability, of doom, of loss, pervades the novel. Even the river on which they are travelling signals this.
The river has picked up all it's met since Tonle Sap and the Cambodian forest.... no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river's strength.
The girl's mother will first lose her house across the river in Cambodia, and years later will lose her final home in France to pay the gambling debts of her older son who has lost the family's money. The girl's younger brother will lose his life to pneumonia during the Japanese occupation. Even colour is lost, annihilated by the strength of the sun.
The connections between the lover and the girl is fragile. It only exists in the room to which he takes her each day after school. It cannot survive outside the room. When the girl has him take her and her brothers on expensive outings, they barely communicate until they are safe once more in their room.
Although the man believes he is desperately in love with the girl, she has no such illusions about him. This gives the reader a somewhat queasy feeling, as the fifteen year old rationalizes her relationship with the wealthy young man, fully believing that in just such ways will she continue to survive in the future. There is no compassion for the young man; perhaps a certain sense of comfort, even comraderie, but none of the passion he feels as he constantly weeps over her. Later, she speaks of the relationship as incestuous, with herself as the child and the lover as the father. There are other hints at incest. Her older brother is always spoken of as the murderer of her mother and younger brother. While not directly the case, he does exert a sinister control over them, which the girl says she has escaped.
The girl is capable of love and passion though. One of the few named people in the novel is her seventeen year old schoolmate Hélène Lagonelle. The girl obsessed over Hélène "...the most beautiful of all things given by God... I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle" However, Hélène was a simple soul, incapable of learning past primary school, unaware of the desire she aroused. One day the girl returned to school to find that she had lost Hélène too, the one person she cared about.
Eventually the girl was taken out of school to be sent to France. The affair ended, a new life began; a life related in the impersonal third person.
There is a dream like feeling throughout this highly autobiographical novel, a feeling of alternately floating and being submerged, which I suspect is even more powerful in the original French. Marguerite Duras was born in Indochina and did have an affair with a Chinese man. She moved to France as a young woman. She revisited and rewrote this affair many times throughout her life, publishing this version from the perspective of an older woman when she was seventy. It won the Prix Goncourt. show less
I believe we all have memories like these – distant, random, mixed with pain, mixed with joy, a purposeful vagueness that is possibly self-induced. The thoughts are disclosed like word-puke, somewhat jumbled, non-linear, occasionally repetitive as though to reinforce the thought, colored with poetic prose, incomplete but the feeling is confirmed. This is what I felt reading Duras’ ‘The Lover’, an autobiographical novel of her youth in Saigon, particularly of her Lover.
It’s 1929. The fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl is in Saigon with her mom, a headmistress in a local school who is a manic-depressive widow, an elder brother who is violent, cruel, and a thief, and an elder brother who is referred to as ‘younger brother’ who show more is kind and gentle but lives in fear of the elder brother’s fist. They are broke and are known as the ‘layabouts’. On a ferry, the girl meets a 30-something wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese that evolves into a year and a half affair. Though wealthy, he is controlled by his father who owns the family’s money and forbids any consideration of their union. The affair ends when she leaves Saigon returning to France.
The emotions are complex as I am sure it was for Duras then and at the time of writing (published in 1984) and for the reader. Needless to say, there is an ickiness with the underage relationship. But it’s more than that with a certain amount of reciprocation and desire on her part – he was her temporary (hours at a time) escape from her reality. She is not seeking pity, yet her words draw you into her darkness. There is an economy of words in her lack of details, but there is also an excess of words to provide a certain dreaminess, that poetic feeling. But as the reader, we know there is nothing pleasant here and that just adds to the ickiness. The narrator speaks of “I”, but also regularly speaks of the protagonist in the third person – the girl, the white girl, the girl with a man’s hat, as though these memories are detachments and denials, not of hers, not of her fifteen to seventeen-year-old self. She also wrote of her lust for her beautiful classmate, her best friend, lusting of her body, of her breasts. She recognizes her own sexual ‘perverseness’ but ignores her sexual confusion.
Perhaps the above is what makes this an award-winning book – that a nearly seventy-year old self can converge her complex teenage years into a haunting tale. Alas, it is not for me. Lastly, I was annoyed with the stereotype description of the Chinese male, his lack of masculinity, his softness, his weeping. Even though I know it’s her truth and likely the truth of that time, it’s still rather off-putting.
Some quotes:
On Beauty – and it’s one heck of a pickup line for a mature lady:
“One day, when 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.”
On Desire:
“You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glace or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.” show less
It’s 1929. The fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl is in Saigon with her mom, a headmistress in a local school who is a manic-depressive widow, an elder brother who is violent, cruel, and a thief, and an elder brother who is referred to as ‘younger brother’ who show more is kind and gentle but lives in fear of the elder brother’s fist. They are broke and are known as the ‘layabouts’. On a ferry, the girl meets a 30-something wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese that evolves into a year and a half affair. Though wealthy, he is controlled by his father who owns the family’s money and forbids any consideration of their union. The affair ends when she leaves Saigon returning to France.
The emotions are complex as I am sure it was for Duras then and at the time of writing (published in 1984) and for the reader. Needless to say, there is an ickiness with the underage relationship. But it’s more than that with a certain amount of reciprocation and desire on her part – he was her temporary (hours at a time) escape from her reality. She is not seeking pity, yet her words draw you into her darkness. There is an economy of words in her lack of details, but there is also an excess of words to provide a certain dreaminess, that poetic feeling. But as the reader, we know there is nothing pleasant here and that just adds to the ickiness. The narrator speaks of “I”, but also regularly speaks of the protagonist in the third person – the girl, the white girl, the girl with a man’s hat, as though these memories are detachments and denials, not of hers, not of her fifteen to seventeen-year-old self. She also wrote of her lust for her beautiful classmate, her best friend, lusting of her body, of her breasts. She recognizes her own sexual ‘perverseness’ but ignores her sexual confusion.
Perhaps the above is what makes this an award-winning book – that a nearly seventy-year old self can converge her complex teenage years into a haunting tale. Alas, it is not for me. Lastly, I was annoyed with the stereotype description of the Chinese male, his lack of masculinity, his softness, his weeping. Even though I know it’s her truth and likely the truth of that time, it’s still rather off-putting.
Some quotes:
On Beauty – and it’s one heck of a pickup line for a mature lady:
“One day, when 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.”
On Desire:
“You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glace or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.” show less
O que mais me comoveu neste livro de Marguerite Duras foi tudo o que escreveu sobre a mãe e o seu desespero diário e brutal: "na minha infância a desgraça da minha mãe ocupou o lugar do sonho". Mas também o que escreveu sobre a família, em que as pessoas não se falavam e só se olhavam através das fotografias; o quarto a que chegou como a desgraça que lhe era anunciada desde de sempre; a tristeza à qual diz que poderia quase dar-lhe o seu nome; a morte do irmão a trazer-lhe uma dor que a fazia sentir que tudo devia morrer, incluindo ela. E comoveu-me também quando afirmou que escrever livros era a única coisa que conseguia ver para além do instante.
Duras changes from first person to third person and place in time and space freely - yet I was never for a moment lost. I always knew what she meant. The writer looks back on herself all those years ago, in French Indochina that no longer exists. Most of her family is dead. She doesn't have any photographs of that day she crossed the river on a ferry wearing a man's hat. The day she was approached by the wealthy Chinese man who became her lover. She was only fifteen. But this is not a tale of that scandal really, the Chinese lover, a man in his thirties, is decent enough, if weak. Her older brother is more sinister, stealing from his family and gambling money away. Yet there is sympathy even for him, an insight into his loneliness. Her show more mother is tragic, poor, a school teacher struggling to raise three children in a land where other whites are rich. Yet the mother is no better morally than any other character, nor is the narrator.
Having lived in Asia and read many books on the 'expat' experience, this one is told from a unique point perspective: a seventy-year-old French writer remembering herself as a teenager (rather than a drunken Western male over fifty recounting his conquests show less
Having lived in Asia and read many books on the 'expat' experience, this one is told from a unique point perspective: a seventy-year-old French writer remembering herself as a teenager (rather than a drunken Western male over fifty recounting his conquests show less
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"L'Amant" de Marguerite Duras, publié en 1984, est un roman semi-autobiographique qui se déroule dans le Vietnam colonial français des années 1920. L'histoire suit la liaison illicite et passionnée entre une jeune fille française issue d'une famille en difficulté financière et un riche amant chinois plus âgé.
La protagoniste anonyme, appelée simplement "la fille", est issue d'une show more famille dysfonctionnelle, et sa relation avec l'amant est marquée par les tabous sociaux, les différences culturelles et les divisions brutales de la société coloniale. Le récit explore les thèmes de l'amour, du désir, de la dynamique du pouvoir et de l'impact des attentes de la société sur les relations personnelles.
Duras utilise un style d'écriture dépouillé et évocateur, qui permet de saisir les émotions intenses et les complexités des personnages. La structure non linéaire et la narration fragmentée du roman contribuent à son caractère onirique et poétique.
"L'Amant" est célèbre pour son exploration des lignes floues entre l'amour et l'exploitation, ainsi que pour sa description poignante de l'éveil sexuel d'une jeune femme et des dures réalités de la vie coloniale. Le roman a reçu le prestigieux prix Goncourt en France et est devenu l'une des œuvres les plus acclamées de Marguerite Duras. show less
La protagoniste anonyme, appelée simplement "la fille", est issue d'une show more famille dysfonctionnelle, et sa relation avec l'amant est marquée par les tabous sociaux, les différences culturelles et les divisions brutales de la société coloniale. Le récit explore les thèmes de l'amour, du désir, de la dynamique du pouvoir et de l'impact des attentes de la société sur les relations personnelles.
Duras utilise un style d'écriture dépouillé et évocateur, qui permet de saisir les émotions intenses et les complexités des personnages. La structure non linéaire et la narration fragmentée du roman contribuent à son caractère onirique et poétique.
"L'Amant" est célèbre pour son exploration des lignes floues entre l'amour et l'exploitation, ainsi que pour sa description poignante de l'éveil sexuel d'une jeune femme et des dures réalités de la vie coloniale. Le roman a reçu le prestigieux prix Goncourt en France et est devenu l'une des œuvres les plus acclamées de Marguerite Duras. show less
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Author Information
226+ Works 18,826 Members
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 Resistance and published her first books. After the show more 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
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Lover
- Original title
- L'amant
- Original publication date
- 1984 (original French) (original French)
- People/Characters*
- Marguerite Duras
- Important places
- Saigon, Vietnam
- Related movies
- L'amant (1992 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For Bruno Nuytten
- First words
- Un jour, j'étais âgée déjà, dans le hall d'un lieu public, un homme est venu vers moi.
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. - Quotations
- I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I deligh... (show all)t.
Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen
I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life's happiness, at its most poignant, couldn't quite make her forget it.
You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time wi... (show all)thout any consequences and without any cause, human or other. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Il lui avait dit que c'était comme avant, qu'il l'aimait encore, qu'il ne pourrait jamais cesser de l'aimer, qu'il l'aimerait jusqu'à sa mort.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death. - Blurbers
- Rossner, Judith; Strouse, Jean; White, Edmund; Weldon, Fay
- Original language
- French
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 843.912
- Canonical LCC
- PQ2607.U8245 A62613
- Disambiguation notice
- This is the 1984 book L'Amant, not to be confused with the 1971 book L'Amour.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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