Name: The Lover
Rating: 3.691860465116279 (86 reviews)
ISBN: 9781101907931

Marguerite Duras

Rachel Kushner

The story of an affair between a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover.

Wartime Notebooks ; Practicalities

The Lover

Sarah Christine Gill

I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. 

That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for mewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it.

I can't really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all colour. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all colour. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she'd order the gig and we'd drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune - those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.

The woman writer takes upon herself her highest responsibility and "quest": enwording the most otherly man. One of the pleasures of loving the Chinese man is to write him down. She may be loving him to have something to write. She has a story to tell because of having loved him.

In the end, Duras is the lover, and she shows us how to see and hear and love and leave Vietnam.

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 going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.

əlizabəth

Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen.

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.

I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

soochie

"... when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing's wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire."

A barely discernible distress suddenly seizes her, a weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there’s a very slight deafness, or fog.

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, 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.

As beautiful as I couldn't ever have dreamed. The whole book tastes as a dream.

Alana Matheus de Jesus Andrade 

The Lover feels raw and delicate at the same time. the writing is spare but it cuts deep, drifting between beauty and ache.

Saigon, 1930s: a poor French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society. A sensational international bestseller and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, The Lover is disturbing, erotic and masterly. This is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between the lovers and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

march🐇

Leer a la director hablar de ella en tercera persona, relatando a una mujer que ya no existe de un tiempo que no puede olvidar y crecer con ese contraste de lo que dejaste por volver a tu realidad, por cada dia que pasaba con el ella envejecia mas, lo que decidimos amar se queda por siempre.

Santiago Alejandro Crime

paola montepiedra

It is truly embarrassing how long it took me to read this

gingy :3

esperanza 

jess

love that seethes to its demise, is surely a love that never is condonable. for love is illogical in nature, and despite the atrocities that aligns its signs, the burning passion and desire triumphs any logical sensibilities. heart-wrenching, nostalgic, class-divided love.. she gave her all, despite knowing she scathes herself offering it to one who doesn't deserve her, alas, as she faced the formless sea, she wept, her first and final, uncontrollable tears. the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of that man and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea. the waves console her, and soon, she starts to write again.

I don't know how to feel about this book and I don't think I ever will.

good kind of weird. sometimes too weird. very stylistically interesting but a drag at parts when she starts rambling, but i suppose that is to be expected. 

Cathy Trình

Antonia Folch

Morgan Thomas

I enjoyed this. I found the writing style a bit distracting at times and couldn't always follow the story. Overall though I thought it explored the strange dark relationships we can have with people well. Our main character, more than the relationship with her lover discusses the tumultuous relationship that she has with her family. Which was at times a more interesting relationship than the one with her lover.

The story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover, set in prewar Indochina

Ana Hein

In prewar Indochina during the last days of colonialism, a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl initiates herself into a world of passion and lust, of abandon and undying love, through her love affair with a Chinese man

Trever

I don't know why the writing style didn't bother me more than it did. Usually the first person present tense with that staccato-like thing bothers me, but it really fit the narrative here. That aspect reminded me of the part of  Cat's Eye that I've read, but I feel like Atwood is too controlled to be able to pull it off. Duras experiments with style and voice, where Atwood follows a fairly traditional structure. (Not to say I don't like Atwood, just not that novel because of the voice.) The story itself isn't that interesting, but the style manages to hook you anyway.

Set in prewar Indochina, this novel tells the story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover

Angbeen Abbas

wow this book HURT. idk what to even say about it because i feel so floored. lots of it doesn’t hold up too well in the 21st century, but still loved it and thought it was wonderfully written

Xenia

this felt so bittersweet and disturbing at the same time, the writing style amazes me too, wow

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