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The Lover Paperback – September 8, 1998

by Marguerite Duras (Author)

4.1 1,735 ratings

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A modern classic and international bestseller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been celebrated by critics and readers across the globe 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, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

This edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen that looks back at Duras's iconic work, winner of France’s Prix Goncourt, as it approaches its fortieth anniversary in print.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

September 8, 1998
Dimensions

5.13 x 0.34 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780375700521
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Powerful, authentic, completely successful . . . perfect."
—The New York Times Book Review

“An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl.”
—Boston Herald

“A vivid, lingering novel . . . a brilliant work of art.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

One of France's most important literary figures, MARGUERITE DURAS is best known in the United States for her novel The Lover, and for her brilliant film script Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She is also the author of many other acclaimed novels (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) and screenplays (Détruire, dit-elle). Born in Saigon in 1914 and died in Paris in 1996.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One day, 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.”

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 delight.

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 don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, I’ve never asked. But I believe I’ve heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they’re going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larges, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I’ve kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It’s got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It’s scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste, I have a face laid waste.

***

So, I’m fifteen and a half.

It’s on a ferry crossing the Mekong River.

The images lasts all the way across.

I’m fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.

***

I’m at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school. My mother is a teacher and wants her girl to have a secondary education. “You have to go to high school.” What was enough for her is not enough for her daughter. High school and then a good degree in mathematics. That was what had been dinned into me ever since I started school. It never crossed my mind I might escape the mathematics degree, I was glad to give her that hope. Every day I saw her planning her own and her children’s future. There came a time when she couldn’t plan anything very grand for her sons any more, so she planned other futures, makeshift ones, but they too served their purpose, they blocked in the time that lay ahead. I remember my younger brother’s courses in bookkeeping. From the Universal Correspondence School—every year, every level. You have to catch up, my mother used to say. It would last for three days, never four. Never. We’d drop the Universal School whenever my mother was posted to another place. And begin again in the next. My mother kept it up for ten years. It wasn’t any good. My younger brother became an accountant’s clerk in Saigon. There was no technical school in the colonies; we owed my elder brother’s departure for France to that. He stayed in France for several years to study at the technical school. But he didn’t keep it up. My mother must have known. But she had no choice, he had to be got away from the other two children. For several years he was no longer part of the family. It was while he was away that my mother bought the land. A terrible business, but for us, the children who were left, not so terrible as the presence of the killer would have been, the child-killer of the night, of the night of the hunter.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0375700528
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; First Edition (September 8, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780375700521
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.34 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #45,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #14 in French Literature (Books)
- #431 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #3,861 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 1,735 ratings

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Listing Books

A wonderful read

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2017

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This book truly is a book that can change one’s idea of what great writing is about.

I have never experienced the amazing one of a kind control that Durras has. She takes, a sentence and brings it to life in an emotional roller coaster of changes within moods and emotional appeal. A word to her, comes to life in vibrant colors of personal senses.

Durras created a living emotionally desired truth, that lingered from page to mind and then into the heart, but most of all the soul. Durras creates inside The Lover something so bold, so exploratory, that the senses of the one reading, can't help but feel wasted, thoroughly excited, and exhausted.

Her writing in The Lover gave such power to words. Her words bled. Her senses became your senses. You were the shutters watching. You were the fedora transfixed upon the head of the school girl. You became her lover. You became the emotional bleeding. You became the desire of colors.

It’s a story about a young girl. A young white girl in Chinese territory. She has a family that is poor and most of all dysfunctional. She soon meets an older Chinese gentleman, rich, lustful. Soon a love affair of desire, unforgettable exploration of the human body. A 15-year-old lost in the arms of the adult world. Consumed by lust, body formation and temptation of seeking explored sexual emotions.

Durras takes an odd reality in telling her story. She jumps from moments in the past, present and the future in telling the ultimate story as it concludes. It’s a mind-numbing journey of passionate embrace of somewhat love, and lust. The reader can’t help turning the page and wondering what happens next, or what style of writing Durras will use. Moments of deep description. Moments of simple story. Moments of laying out the characters in all their details. From a mother, clearly with psychological problems. An older brother of hate, anger, greed, lust, power, criminal nature. A younger brother, calm, collected and somewhat emotionally lost. Your young white girl, the focus of the story. A child lost in an adult world.

Would I Return to it Again: Already have? Read it twice before writing this review. It’s amazing story that is passionate, dark and emotionally charged.

Would I Recommended: In a heartbeat. One of my favorite books. I think any lover of great story telling will truly take to this book.

Pages: 117

Year Published: 1984

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Four Words: Brilliant. Emotional. Seductive. Intense.

47 people found this helpful

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C. Collins

Remembering the sexual past

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2005

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The Lover by Marquerite Duras is a well written book, structured like dreams and memories rather than a chronological or logical sequence of events and impressions. The book is short, a little over a 100 pages, and is written in short impressionistic paragraphs that move from present to various days in the past.

A French family in Indochina is reduced to working-poor status due to the death of the father and the mother's attempts to maintain the family while working as a school administrator. Yet this family if full of tensions since the mother favors the worthless older brother at the expense of the middle-child sister and younger brother. This mother barely can keep food on the table while trying to rescue the older son from debts, fights, and other problems. This allows the daughter to grow up too fast, acting as the mother for the emotionally neglected younger brother. The young woman sometimes is the narrarator and sometimes the story is told in third person. Duras pulls this off with ease.

What happens to girls that are forced to grow up too fast? This is really the theme of this wonderful book. For girls that are put in this position make bad choices and are exposed to too much adult pain too soon. Living in a boarding school with little supervision, she wears make-up too soon and dresses provocatively too soon. Duras hints that the young woman, though still a virgin, is contemplating prostitution. Wearing her mother's tight rust colored silk dress, with gold lame high heels, and a floppy man's hat, she is spotted by the son of a Chinese millionare. This man is 12 years older than she, making her 15 and thus making him 27. Their affair begins with her first act of intercourse. She is so nieve that she is surprised that she bleeds when penetrated. Yet she is so matter of fact about her body, throughout the novel, it is her instrument that she gradually learns to play.

In the early stages of the affair, her Chinese lover trembles and shakes as he seduces her and makes love to her. He is transparent in his obsession with her. Being still a child, she is not yet ready for the full release of Eros in the body, so she attends to the power she seems to have over this adult male. Gradually, with daily love making, she moves from the manipulative child -struggling to survive to an adult woman, learning to make love and all the vast range of variations and powers and secrets that this involves. Her boarding school teachers are outraged that she returns at night in the early hours, but her mother is her ally here, allowing her to grow up fast, so that she is released from being another burden to this incredibly weak mother.

She learns the power of being the desired one and she learns desire. Here desire growns with her emotional experience. He totally indulges his role as the one totally lost in love for the cooler, more detached partner, suffering because his love is not totally matched, and desiring her to the point of obsession.

This book is a wonderful dreamlike reflection on the awakening of love and all its powers (in her) and the exquisite pain of sexual obsession and becoming lost in the beloved (in him). I recommend the book and invite the reader to approach the text as if reviewing memories and dreams and reflections, allow the emotions to make sense of the book, don't try to make it chornologically fit together, since like your own past, it is a scattering of passions and sensations.

142 people found this helpful

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Heather Poole

I love this book!

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2012

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For years I couldn't get this sexy, sad, romantic, and somewhat disturbing story out of my head after seeing the movie so long ago. The fact that it's somewhat biographical is what I found most intriguing. Duras is a wonderful writer. This is not easy reading, as her words are like poetry, but the book is a quick read. It's absolutely amazing what she gives the reader in a little over 100 pages. It's one of those stories you can't wait to get back to, but are afraid to read too quickly because you really don't want it to end. Now I'm ready to pack my bags, cross the river, and see the night skies of Saigon. I might even wear a man's hat and gold lame shoes while doing so. Next up, The Sea Wall, another book written by the same author with some of the same themes running through it.

3 people found this helpful

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Roman Clodia

Melancholy and troublingly nostalgic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2021

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Gorgeously disturbed and disturbing, fragrant with melancholy and a kind of sepia-tinted nostalgia for lost innocence, youth, love. But while the ostensible eponymous lover is the wealthy Chinese man with whom the barely adult (she's fifteen) narrator has a subversive affair, I can't help feeling that this is more widely concerned with love of a place, a time, a family and - especially - a mother who simultaneously enrages and yet leaves the narrator wanting to know and possess her.

Evocations of sex, desire and death collide and repeat themselves and we return obsessively to key moments: the girl on the boat in her silk dress, man's hat and gold lamé shoes, the expensive black limousine, photographs that encode a lost time and people no longer living.

Duras' prose is hallucinogenic, mesmerising and, like spme other female writers, she is expert at writing through what isn't said - life and meaning exists in the gaps of the unspoken. The narrator also slips seamlessly between past and present, between 'I' and 'she' as she turns her older, writer's gaze on the girl she once was, making herself both subject and author of the text - a text which balances tentatively somewhere on the spectrum between fiction and notorious biography.

With a light touch, Duras sketches in what it means to grow up female, poor, but a member of a white coloniser race in what was French Indo-China (now Vietnam), and gestures towards all kinds of transgressions related to gender, race, age, even what is and isn't allowed within conventional family feelings.

At only around 120 pages, this is extraordinarily resonant, both beautiful but also troubling for many reasons. What an oversight that so little of Duras' writing has been translated and is in print.

5 people found this helpful

Manan Desai

Sensuous inventive prose but lost in translation

Reviewed in India on October 3, 2017

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The Lover is about a 15 year old French girl (or as she would say 15 and a half) falling in love with an older rich Chinese man in his late 20s in pre-war French occupied Indo-China and how they could not be together due to mores of the day and place. It is based on real life experiences of the author when she was young, though Marguerite Duras wrote it when she was in her late 80s.

The protagnist and the her lover remain nameless. Names of only supporting character are given. Narrative shifts from present to past to even future. The style of the novel is quite unusual and inventive. As it is with all the novels with thin to non-existent plot, this one has vivid description of a lot of small things. Some of these are the first meeting of the protagnist and her lover on a ferry, the only sex scene, their first, in a dark room adjoining a busy street.

I particularly liked the description of clothing in two scenes. One of the protagnist on the ferry and the other of her friend in a hostel. This goes against the advice of Stephen King in his seminal 'On Writing' to refrain from describing clothing. But it works very well here.

Although this translation has been awarded, it feels as if some of the poetic quality of prose has been lost in translation. When I am proficient enough in French, I would like to read this in original form.

Short novel with sensuous inventive prose. Should be read if you are fond of French or unusual writing. But not everybody's cup of tea.

4 people found this helpful

Michael G. Francis

A glimpse into colonial life in South East Asia.

Reviewed in Canada on January 4, 2014

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I bought this book because I visited the house where the Chinese lover lived on the shores of the Mekong River in Vietnam. I heard the story from a women who provided tours of the house. I then proceeded to Saigon and visited the traditional Chinese area of the city knowing that a lot of this book's action took place in that area. I enjoyed my visit to Vietnam. I bought this book along with Graham Green's Quiet American. The books took me back to the sights, heat, and tensions of the country. I loved them both. They are better read after a visit than before. I recommend them. Marguerite Duras is a gifted writer. She uses words sparingly but effectively. The Lover is a treat.

2 people found this helpful

よんさまてあも

18歳で私は年老いた･･･わかりにくい純愛

Reviewed in Japan on August 16, 2004

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　デュラスの文体は代名詞を多用し平易でない為、主語が誰（何）かわかりにくいが日本語よりも英語の方が読みやすい気が･･･。He,Sheが誰かを確認しながら読み進める作品。
　支配者側ではあるが貧しい白人少女と、被支配者ではあるが裕福な中国人青年との逢瀬。複雑な家庭環境で育った、愛が何かすらわからない15歳半の少女が、インドシナを離れフランスに帰国するまでの彼とのやりとりや二人と取り巻く環境には最初から最後まで切なさを感じます。
　
　若く自分の価値を知る計算高い少女が、シルクワンピースとハイヒールに身を包み、青年を翻弄し、時に残酷な言葉も平気で口走りますが、それが本音ではないと知りつつもお互いに傷つけあいます。
　
　最後、二人の電話の会話は、27歳で12歳も年下のフランス人少女に出会った時の臆病な青年の変わらぬ気持ちを感じてほっとしつつも、やはり切なさはぬぐえません。許されなかった間柄ではありますが、永い年月を経てまだなお彼女に緊張しながら電話をするのはやはり純愛ゆえだと思います。

3 people found this helpful

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Lyn G Farrell

A breathtaking depiction of place, both social and geographical but at times confusing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2024

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Oh heck! Controversial I know but despite the beautiful descriptions and overa wonderful writing, I only give it 3 stars.

It felt disjointed at times, and confusing, as to where the narrator was. Perhaps I was reading too quickly and not paying enough attention but sometimes it just jumped from one place to another and I was keen on that structure at all.

Definitely worth a read though - for the description of the places and the beauty of her writing.

One person found this helpful

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