The Lover

By Marguerite Duras

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307801203

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was one of Europe’s most distinguished writers. The author of many novels and screenplays, she is perhaps best known outside France for her filmscript Hiroshima Mon Amour and her Prix Goncourt-winning novel THE LOVER, also filmed. Her other books include LA DOLEUR, BLUE EYES BLACK HAIR, SUMMER RAIN and THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. Born in Indochina in 1914, Marguerite Duras died in 1996.

Reviews for The Lover

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Ik weet niet wat het was, maar het lukte me gewoon niet om dit nochtans dunne boekje gelezen te krijgen. Misschien is het de filmische stijl van Duras.

[auntie0nanuuq · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Best of 1984 Challenge.....(which I may or may not finish)

I'm not rating this, because I really don't care one way or the other about it.

Fifteen years old, crossing the river on a ferry, in a worn sleeveless silk dress, gold lame sandals on her feet, an flat man's fedora on her head.....she meets a Chinese man 12 years her senior in a black limousine. The go to a room in town and they become lovers.

Her life is crap, her mother head mistress, her father dead, her younger brother just there, & her older brother afraid of her, yet abusive.....

There is no apparent sense of time, just bits of the story crossing its own time worn path.

Even when there are tears, anger, loss there is no sadness, no feelings, no emotions...... It's all as if written in dream time. Not even the so called "erotic" has feelings in this book..... Lyrical yet empty.

[hmgthomas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite books; such an amazing love story. Beautiful.

[maxernst11 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Ik weet niet wat het was, maar het lukte me gewoon niet om dit nochtans dunne boekje gelezen te krijgen. Misschien is het de filmische stijl van Duras.

[autumnesf · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Shades of Lolita. Gag.

[bale_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful!

[brangwinn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think I need to see the movie to appreciate this book. I picked it up because I was traveling in Cambodia at the time and was in the area the film was made.

[timbazzett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

THE LOVER, a novel by Marguerite Duras, is a book I've had on my to-read list ever since I read a review of the film adaptation more than twenty years ago. The book is probably autobiographical fiction, since I have read that almost all of Duras's books are based on her own life. The book was first published in 1984 and Duras died in 1996.While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..." Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple - "... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[justine_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

brilliant, spare language, but sad

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Marguerite Duras' style hasn't sat well with me in the past (I couldn't fathom "Hiroshima Mon Amour"), but it's eerily effective here at transmitting the pain of memories too delicate to examine closely, too powerful to be ignored. It's a short work but not easily penetrated; my way was greatly eased for having seen the movie adaptation.French-occupied southeast Asia, pre-WWII: a young French girl enters a liaison with a wealthy Chinese man. I thought I knew this story, but the novel goes considerably more in-depth with the girl's family. As semi-autobiography, it felt like the author was recalling scattered images in hopes of piecing together a whole picture that explained how she survived such a chaotic life. Some memories seem almost incidental, e.g. running from the madwoman - unless taken symbolically. She flees the madwoman at age eight as she would flee the threat of descending into madness herself almost ten years later. Her own mother is mentally unwell, there is little about her family that is normal, and she has nothing to cling to and no one to rely on. Her lover offers some respite, though he is hardly a refuge. She revels in their shared moments together, but perceives his weakness and feels no protection. The movie led me to believe this was a story primarily about mistaking love's identity, not recognizing it until too late. The novel is something more complex, portraying the basking in another's proffered love as grasping at a tenuous lifeline, a means of survival.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a young girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home to her boarding school in Saigon. She meets the son of a Chinese businessman and becomes his lover. Reading it, you feel you are looking at a dark-hued portrait of lovers embracing surrounded by a mysterious and impenetrable jungle of blackness. It is a ravishingly beautiful work of art that has a dream-like quality.

[mromano_95 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this novel during a class entitled "experimental fiction". It is a wonderfully written short novel. The poetry of the prose is sparse. The word "minimalist" is used a lot when speaking of Duras. I find her work refreshing in the same manner of Pinter or Hemingway. The story itself is semi-autobiographical and concerns a relationship between a young French girl and a Chinese Businessman. Well worth the time.

[joshberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't love The Lover, but as a fan of all 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.

[pummzie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this novella. The Lover is about the reflections of an older Parisian woman on pivotal moments in her adolescence both in Saigon and Paris. Except, true to life but rare in novels, these events are hazy, misremembered and haphazard and her recollections jump around from memory to aside to self-analysis. I found myself waiting for the things I knew she would not tell me. Duras gives us enough to keep us hooked but leaves you with a great many questions.Her style is moreish and I really admire the delicate handling of growing up around domestic instability and this child's precociousness and vulnerability. The Lover is a masterclass in how to do an awful lot with deceptively sparse writing.

[fieldnotes_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The tone of this book is emotionally flatlined. Terror, physical ecstasy, hatred and depression all file past in the same abstracted, languorous fashion: mentioned, but not really written. We know that the early part of this narrator's life was characterized by withdrawal and passive observation and that she has taken to drinking in her middle age (we also know this is a French novella from the end of the 20th century); but these facts don't entirely justify the loosely structured and vaguely experienced narrative.The few times that the prose seemed to snap into greater focus, were around cherished objects (a fedora, some shoes) or images; but these are static things and however much meaning they are forced to carry, they cannot be as lively as multi-dimensional characters. And "The Lover" is not full of multi-dimensional characters. It has, at most, two. The narrator is somewhat nuanced, the mother is bipolar and everyone else is essentially a drive towards something and a flaw (desire and weakness; power and selfishness; tranquility and terror). I tire of the stereotypical wastrel brother, of the speechless cowering brother and also of the precious and spineless lover himself.But, I did enjoy this book. It came close to being quite good. I just wish that it flexed more or grappled harder or pulled itself together; though, again, I understand that the narrative style could be interpreted as the logical outcome of the storyteller's upbringing. However, and lastly, I can't really abide by the two or three intrusive semi-portraits of society ladies in France; these seemed poorly integrated and diverting--even the appearance of Hellene in the novella seemed under-managed. If she had not existed as a mute alternative and object of desire, she might have been a more interesting collection of words.Finally, if the girl's age were given as 18 or older, I doubt the book would have been so successful.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Autobiographical story of growing up in Vietnam. Her parents are teachers. The father dies and the mother stays. They are poor. The mother has a mental illness and doesn't really pay attention to the children. The oldest son steals everything from the family to support his drug habit. The girl, age 15, becomes a lover to a Chinese male.There is no connectivity to anything. She write emotionless and describes sex as something she is observing. Is she actually being sexually abused to support the family and no one does anything to stop it?

[kirmuriel-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Intriguing, fascinating, and real. Marguerite mixes times, events, feelings but all in a captivating form, never loosing the readers interest.

[nataliec7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Its an emotional book, shocking and at times a slightly disturbing book. But I continiued to read, wanting to know more and more. Hoping that the end was what I hoped. It wasn't, but that didnt stop me from enjoying this book.

[purplehena · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hmm, I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's an easy read ... the paperback is only 117 pages, and the language is not difficult. It's written beautifully, but I felt very detached from the main character, as though I couldn't quite "get" her and everything she was trying to express. I enjoyed reading this, but it left me puzzled. It's worth checking out, and it may greatly impact you and strike you as a "work of literary genius" (from the back cover). Or, it might not. I think this one depends on who you, the reader, are, and on the experiences you have had.

[sidiki-8 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I saw the movie first and loved it so much that I bought the book, as one learns more about the characters, in print, rather than on screen. But the book proved disappointing. Still I am glad I read it because it was the source of the beautifully projected movie. Seemed like the characters were just flowing like leaves in flood water having no power over their own lives leaving everything to fate except maybe the Chinese man's passion and obsession with the girl; but again he was helpless to take the reins of his life in his own hands and so succumbed to the wishes of his father and society.

[lucybrown_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Lover treads lines been between enigmatic and thready, subtle and shallow, frustrating as hell and heaven in a book. Fortunately, it came out on the right side of the lines for my tastes. Readers of Gide and Colette will probably like, or even love, Duras's novella.

[laurat81 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was very interested in reading The Lover after having watched the film and glad to enjoy the same tone of sadness and desire. I did find it a bit hard to follow at times and with an odd flip flopping of point of view, which I assume is intentional. This book is supposedly autobiographical and I imagine that Duras writes from the past as if seeing a ghost or image of herself, and uses "the girl" or "I" interchangeably. If you want something short, unique, and sensual on a rainy summer day, this is it.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novella is absolutely beautifully written. The prose is akin to poetry. This is a story of sexual awakening, of family and culture, set in Viet Nam during French colonization. Magnificent!

[wendyrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short and clever story about a young, French woman of fifteen living in French Indo-China (now Viet-nam I think) in difficult family circumstances. She has a passionate relationship with a Chinese man which cannot end happily (she is underage for a start and both cultures would be horrified at their relationship).Entertaining

[karlus_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This beautifully-written slender volume is neither conventional fictional novel nor usual factual autobiography. Rather, it is an intensely artistic narration by the author based on a number of isolated but significant periods and people from her life. The mode of telling is closest to stream-of-consciousness, as individually recollected scenes are frequently presented out of normal sequence in isolated and unconnected vignettes.Overall it is the story of a nameless French woman, arguably Duras herself who, as a 15-year-old teenager from a poor and dysfunctional French family, deliberately attracts the attention of a young man, scion of a wealthy Chinese family, in French Indo-China in the 1930s. Her original purpose might have been family support through child prostitution, but it develops that the man's wealth is not yet available to him and a torrid and illegal love affair develops instead. Or are they only "in lust," instead of "in love?" The reader will have to try to decide the question based only on the passionate events described; their individual feelings, passions and thoughts are artfully kept from the reader in the author's quirky manner of narrating only the exteriors of visible scenes.After a while the scene shifts as she leaves for school in Paris and spends the remainder of her life there. The unnnamed lover is left behind and a number of women from Duras' own life during WW II float onto center stage, again with narrative purpose difficult to discern.The story is difficult to follow, but close reading can reassemble the pieces in proper order. Nevertheless, this reader was left with the feeling that this was very much a story of self-revelation, told by a narrator who was reluctant to be revealed -- especially with respect to her inner feelings. If this oxymoronic nature of the story does not put you off, or you are up to reading literary puzzles posed by a famous author, then by all means accept the challenge of this book and enjoy pages and pages of beautiful narrative description of life and love in a past time and a historical place along the Mekong River.

[tigermel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A little book, barely 100 pages, packed with so much emotion and imagery i don't even know how to describe it. It is intense, in a way i haven't read in a while. Technically it is a story of a very poor French teenager, in Vietnam in the 1920's, who takes as her lover a wealthy Chinese man. Character-wise, he doesn't seem much more than a boy himself, though he is in his late 20's. But we get so much more information about the girl's life than we do about her affair. We hear about her mother, essentially a crazy woman, about both her brothers and their lives and deaths. The girl, who never gives her name, is weirdly detached from everyone but seems to be able to understand people deeply. The descriptions are lush and exotic. It seems to be a novel full of yearning and need. I am going to put it aside for a month or so and then read it again to see how i feel about it then.

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

assured, sensual, obnoxiously confident elliptical writing.

[jeterat-844391 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really loved this short novel. I finished it in a night. The story was beautiful and haunting. I could see how Duras influenced later women writers. Absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a love story or anyone looking to follow Maugham's Painted Veil with something similar.

[sometimeunderwater · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Did nothing for me. Felt like a loose sketch for a novel which was never completed. Some questionable writing too (perhaps a translation issue?). For example "Going back to Saigon I feel I'm going on a journey, especially when I take the bus, and this morning I've taken the bus"... Yeesh.

[jonfaith · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don't look at him either. They can't. They're incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they'd be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society.

There are a plethora of splendid reviews of The Lover by my GR friends. Read those. My own reactions were of a lower cut, more bruised and bottom shelf. I found the novel to be one of shame. Take the girl and her situation, colonials on the down and out. There is a great deal of local color but, the characters find themselves clinging to the short side of the stick. A great poet once said, "I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home." Their failure is malignant. It clings to their clothes and hazes their spoiled breath. I found the erotic to be negligible as well, a clingy despair in contrast to the angelic breasts of the protagonist's schoolmate. There's a wisdom in that, I suppose, however ephemeral. Duras succeeds in making the reader uncomfortable. The framing dynamic is between the older Chinese man and the fifteeen year old protagnist, wry in her man's hat and gold shoes. That relationship is outflanked by the Naturalisti images Duras weaves of Parisian garrets and the familial failures of dissipation.

My year of reading (mostly French) women continues in pace with a philosophy of the here and now. This was a detour of benefit.