The Lover: A Review

Jennifer's review on Marguerite Duras' semi-autobiographical novel: The Lover.

Immersive and scandalous, but without a care for reputation, the narrator in The Lover, fifteen and a half, pursues a precarious relationship with a man twelve years her senior. Set in colonial Vietnam, the narrator is a precocious adolescent French girl with a mother who has lost all her wealth. Her race and class are a direct contrast to her unnamed lover, a rich Chinese man who lives on his father’s wealth. The relationship is physical and sensual; the two feel this sort of magnetic attraction to each other despite the seeming wrongness of the relationship.

This story had an enigmatic pull to it. It's beautifully written in a nonlinear, disordered timeline, shifting between the periods of before the lover, during the lover, and after the lover. The narrator recollects fragments of her memories: incomplete ones, ones she cannot fully remember, and the ones that are searing and unforgettable.

At the very beginning of the story, the narrator focuses on her appearance—her young face that appears old at eighteen, a face that is "ravaged" by the loss of her lover. Her staple outfit at fifteen and a half in Vietnam: her worn beige silk dress, gold lamé shoes, the belt around her waist, the two braids tied with black ribbons, and the pink fedora (a man’s hat). While she recounts details of her family background, the narrator refocuses for a moment, back to the scene at hand and repeats: “Fifteen and a half. Crossing the river”, like an incantation of the concrete facts of the day she first met her lover.

Duras lays out the events that happened to the narrator as a peek into the memories of an experience that occurred fifty years prior. Here, she often dissociates from the story and refers to herself as “she” in the third person rather than “I,” especially in the physical scenes with her lover. While the tone of the novel often feels distant and reflective, this dissociation also mirrors the profoundly "ravaging" effects this experience had on the narrator, possibly demonstrating that despite the time that has passed, she still feels an attachment to her past lover, where alienating herself from her own experiences serves as a way of coping with her lost love.

I do not know how to feel about the relationship in The Lover, even more shocking and difficult to judge as a semi-autobiographical novel. It is hard to pinpoint whether the affair at hand is true love or not, but what Duras makes clear is that it is a relationship fuelled by desire, strong enough that the relationship lasts a year and a half, only ending when the narrator leaves for France. I found the relationship toxic and filled with intricacies in power—a girl with so much sexual power over a wealthy man; a man with enough money to pull the girl out of poverty. And yet, the lover remains a lowly Chinese man, unworthy of even a poor French girl from a fallen family. The Lover is fascinating and unconventional. It takes on an insular examination of what is meant to be a revolting relationship, that in the end, feels sympathetic; a relationship that is a place of solace for both of the characters, away from the pressures of their families. For the narrator, especially, I think she finds escape from her family, which is wrought with the messy dynamics of a depressed mother, a violent gambler as one older brother, and another brother who is mute.

The Lover is an uncomfortable story that challenges the idea of what is an acceptable relationship. I think that many books like this are published now in our less conservative society, but still get criticised for the off-putting and supposedly unorthodox relationships that they present. It is easy to judge quickly, but with books like The Lover, we are forced to reevaluate the societal standards we have placed on the relations between people and rewire how we examine and make sense of the interactions in the world.