The Lover

By Marguerite Duras

The Lover by Marguerite Duras is not a long, nor an epic, book. It is only slightly over 100 pages of simple prose that flows as swiftly as the river that begins it all. It is the story of an affair that lasts less than two years, bracketed by the knowledge of an older self that provides no comfort to the loss of a love or to the disintegration of a family. The detachment that pervades, the indifference to abuse and loneliness, is at times so overwhelming that you must walk away and digest the events in order to begin to feel again. Duras pulls no punches and makes no scenes. That is your job, reader. And you’ll find that you are left with no choice but to do it.

This is a novel of what is not said. It is a clash—a clash between family members, between societies and classes, between the emotions you can swallow and the ones you cannot—but not one that happens on the page. Instead you find it in the space that is created by turning a page, in the line breaks that are littered throughout the novel. A death occurs, you do not know why. A pause. No funeral. You move on.

This is not the first time Duras has told this story of love and innocence lost. It is not the first, or even the second time, that she has lived it. Rather, it is the third of her books (of an eventual four) to deal with her own adolescence and her affair with a Chinese man when she was still in her early teenage years and living in what was then French Indochina but is now Vietnam. The versions differ, as all memories and retellings do, but the emotions remain true. Here, she treats them with a struggle. The narrator changes from the first to the third person randomly and with no warning, a distancing of her emotional self even stronger than that of the stark and beautiful language you follow throughout. The last seven pages, the emotional climax of the book, are thrust away from the narrator with such force that you almost want to weep for that alone—the pain of a memory so much to bear that the memory itself is secondary.

When you walk away from The Lover, you walk away with memories seared to your soul: a long black limousine where a man waits with his face turned away, a brother looting through the cabinets for opium money, showers that come from a lover with jars of water. The women are beautiful and the families dysfunctional, the lover an impossible attainment. Like the narrator and her Chinese man, you are left with a time you’ll never forget.