Marguerite Duras
Paperback | Pages: 117 pages Rating: 3.75 | 33606 Users | 2420 Reviews
Details Books To The Lover (The Lover #1)
| Original Title: | L'Amant |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The Lover #1 |
| Setting: | Indochina,1929 Vietnam |
| Literary Awards: | Prix Goncourt (1984), PEN Translation Prize for Prose for Barbara Bray (1986), Prix Ritz-Paris-Hemingway (1986), Scott Moncrieff Prize for Barbara Bray (1986) |
Explanation Supposing Books The Lover (The Lover #1)
***AWARDED THE 1984 PRIX GONCOURT*** “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”
The young Marguerite Duras
She has pretty hair, copper hair that spools down her back in waves of alluring movement. People always comment on how beautiful her hair is which she interprets to mean that they don’t find her pretty.
She cuts her hair off.
She wears what is left in pigtails. She buys a man’s hat that is certainly eccentric for a young girl to wear in Saigon in 1929. She wants people to notice her eyes, her lips, certainly something other than her hair. She wants reassurance that her beauty is larger than one exquisite feature.
She is fifteen and a half. Her father is dead. Her mother is poor. Her older brother is a layabout, spoiled by her mother. Her other brother is nice, but no match for the rest of the family. She is lost in a world between adulthood and childhood, a dream world, and a world of harsh realities. Her mother insists that she study mathematics, but she wants to be a writer.
She has a friend at school. A lovely friend totally uninhibited and unaware of how beautiful she is. ”Hélène Logonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much….I am worn out with desire for Hélène Logonelle. I am worn out with desire.”
He has a limousine with a chauffeur. He is rich, or let me be more precise, his father is rich. He is Chinese. He is infatuated with her.
He trembles with fear born desire.
She wants them both. ”I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to giver herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Logonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death.”
Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jane March star in the 1992 French Film.
He is twenty-seven, but it is as if she were older. He is slender, insubstantial, built like a boy. A man trapped in a young mind. Arrested development. ”He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.” He is hindered instead of strengthened by his father. He is obsessed with her, with her nubile body, but knows his father will never let him keep her.
”She wasn’t sure that 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.”
This book is based on the real life of Marguerite Donnadieu better known as Marguerite Duras. She was born in Saigon and did have a wealthy, much older, Chinese lover. At fifteen I think most of us believe we will love many people. We will have many exciting affairs of the heart. True love will be a field of flowers not a single stem already residing in the hand. At fifteen, even when we think we are in love, we can’t know whether it is real. Our basis of comparison is too slender, too new, too wrapped in hormonal need to really know what we feel is love.
I love this picture of Marguerite Duras. The languid, weighted eyelids are a point of fascination.
She wrote this novel at the age of seventy. After fifty-five years I’m sure that Duras’s memories have been filtered through many lenses. The sepia tones of her time with her Chinese lover have deepened. The uncertainty is gone and she is left with clear, concise, brush strokes of a commemoration of lost love. This is a novel and from what I read there are deviations from her nonfiction accounts of her first affair, but this book reads of truth. The reader is left with a precise picture of a young woman who may have lost some of her innocence, but gains a self-confidence to break away from her meaningless life and swim for a new shore.
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| Title | : | The Lover (The Lover #1) |
| Author | : | Marguerite Duras |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 117 pages |
| Published | : | September 8th 1998 by Pantheon Books (first published September 1st 1984) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. France. Classics. Romance. European Literature. French Literature. Literature. Novels |
Rating Based On Books The Lover (The Lover #1)
Ratings: 3.75 From 33606 Users | 2420 ReviewsRate Based On Books The Lover (The Lover #1)
L'Amant looks simple on the surface. Marguerite Duras, about 70 when she wrote it, tells you about her first affair, with a rich Chinese man. She was a fifteen year old girl in colonial-era Vietnam, he was a dozen years older. Her family was desperately poor. Her mentally ill mother tacitly condoned the relationship; Marguerite's lover was generous, and they needed the money. Then she screamed at her daughter and beat her. The language is plain, unadorned and impersonal, stripped to its bareMy full review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, can be found on my blog.An autobiographical story about an affair between a young French girl and a Chinese man, set near Saigon, The Lover wavers between repression and indulgence. The tone is detached, the description spare, the narrative fragmented; in spite of the the cool aloofness of Duras's prose, though, the novel is incredibly sensual. Each image glints and radiates a warmth much at odds with the narrator's emotional reticence.
Marguerite Duras has written the remarkable story of her childhood love affair with a wealthy older man, who happened to be Chinese. Their tumultuous love affair took place in pre-war Saigon in 1929. The book is written with exquisite language expressing perfectly the powerful emotions of the innocent girl as she experiences first love with an exotic and loving older man. The young French girl faces disgrace on many levels. She is no longer respected because of the illicit affair; the fact that
A little book about an intense, illicit affair between a 15 yr old poor white girl and a wealthy 27 year old Chinese man. Duras writes a very atmospheric novella here..I liked it
DesireThe first time ever I saw your face was on the ferry.I had my head buried in a copy of the South China Morning Post. My father had said, if I read it every day, I would learn about the world around us, and his boy would become a man. Only then would I be ready to take over the family business after him.He was right, in his way. I was thin and soft and naïve, even though I had just returned from two years in Paris. I was still a boy, at 28. Im sure I would have continued as a boy, unless I
Who is Lamant(*)? The characters in this story are nameless. A puzzle of personal pronouns draws an anonymous canvas that perspires with alienation and the dense humidity of a foreign land, that mourns the loss of youth and innocence, that invokes the image of photographs never taken, the sound of words never uttered and the mirage of a future that never existed. Only the condensed ardour that clouds up the windows of a small hotel room, where two slippery bodies abandon themselves to contorting
i found myself utterly muted by this book, which is problematic because the book club meets this friday, and they aren't going to be so dazzled by my bruschetta that i can get away with just hiding behind the tiny jewess and drinking their wine. so i have to think of something. consulting the "reading group handbook" by rachel w. jacobsohn, bought for my final school assignment, i learn how to think about literature:characters and story line: young french girl, older chinese man falling into bed
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