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Editorial Review Product Description
Two outcasts--an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover--struggle to be together during the waning days of the colonial period. Reprint. Movie tie-in. National ad/promo. ... Read more Customer Reviews (61) 
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Duras articulates so beautifully everything I feel, but cannot find the words to say.For me, this is close to perfection.The beauty in her prose lays in what is not said, in what can only be felt.
Fine story from Duras
This is an ok book, it tells the story about Duras affair as a young teenager, with an older Chinese man. During the account Duras changes between past and present tense. She also sometimes write about herself as "I" and sometimes in third person, I haven't really figured out why she makes these changes. The matarial of this book one supposes could actually be developed into a real moving novel, I don't know why Duras kept the story in this short form. Perhaps she was lazy? As it stand now it somewhat has a sketchy form, which perhaps is ok? But I think I would have prefered if she had made a longer and more elaborated novel out of the material. And those inconsistencies I mentioned in the start (about past and present tense and I account and third person) Well maybe the book would have been better without those litterary experiments?
This is a book for those who have a unrequited love
I love this book. It's not written from the movie THE LOVER 1992 but from the author'sown view of her life in Indochina as a young teen and her family and her Chinese lover. It's a beautiful love story but sad in the end.If you have a love who you could not be with in life, then you could relate to this book.It's also great to watch the movie THE LOVER which the movie was based on.Not for children or young teen because of subject matter.
interesting effort but hard to love
I didn't love The Lover, but as a fan of things Vietnamese I'm glad I read this semi-autobiographical story of Duras growing up in French Indochina. The loose, episodic narrative--about a teenage girl, her unstable family, and her older Chinese lover--requires some comfort with ambiguity as well as patience to put the pieces of the plot together. The narrator somehow manages to be emotionally overwrought and indifferent at the same time; an American reader is likely to find her exceptionally French. But to Duras' credit, The Lover is knowingly brief and often poetic; it feels something like an experimental but successful prose poem.
From Lolita's point of view ...
...well, not literally, but there certainly are parallels. This novella is set in Indochina, in the `30's, and is told, via fragments of the memory of an older woman now living in France, of her life as a precocious 15 year old, and her first sexual experiences, and perhaps, with the emphasis on the uncertainty, despite the title, of her first love. The book is light on eroticism; it is far more about the female use of sex for, if you will, "empowerment," which, in part, involves escape from an unhappy childhood situation. In gold lame high-heels and a foppish male hat, she meets her lover (or victim?), a 27 year old son of a Chinese millionaire, on a ferry as they cross the Mekong.
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay for the movie, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," released 50 years ago. Far more so, the movie IS about love; like "The Lover," the love is trans-cultural, and each individual has experienced a significant trauma: the Japanese male was near Hiroshima, and lost family members there when the A-Bomb was dropped; she is French, and had a German officer as a lover in the village of Nevers, known for its "calme," and after the war she was ostracized as a "collabo," including having her hair shorn. "The Lover" also concerns West-East love, again, between a French woman (girl) and an Oriental male. The "trauma" each has experienced is more internalized, relating to their family. He can never be his "own man," living under the shadow of a domineering father. She lives in a very dysfunctional family, with a worthless elder brother, who keeps the family mired in poverty through his drug and gambling addictions, and a mother, from her Picardy farm, who worships him, largely neglecting the other two siblings.
For a novella, Duras has more insights than many a 600 page novel. Her style is rich and dense, and I do NOT feel that she is projecting the wisdom of a middle age woman back onto a 15-year old. Consider: "I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think."Or, "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 glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationships, or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it."
The book is also about the "expat" existence, that transcends the 40,000 French "colons," who were the raison d'etre for drawing both France, and later, the United States, into seemingly endless war, first for their "lifestyles," but later, for the "glory," "honor", and eventually, "saving face," of their respective countries. But this particular expat story did not involve riches, and a fancy lifestyle, but poverty, the "barely getting by," that was rather surprising, even though they too had servants. Consider: "... from the frightful loneliness of serving in out-posts up-country, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever and oblivion." They lived primarily in Sadec, a small town in the Mekong delta, which alas, I had never heard of. They did have a large house, with the veranda, and could see the "mountains of Siam," in the evening, which was the only puzzling part of the book, since clearly you couldn't.
That quibble aside, Marguerite Duras has written a rich, beautiful novel, concerning the time when we thought we were fresh, and awaking into one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence, and as will happen all too frequently, it was tawdry.
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