Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. After “The Lover,” Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. Says Leslie Garis, in a 1991 profile of Duras in the New York Times: Sometimes, it seems, truth is more in the feeling. Duras seems to argue that it is transformative, and a guiding current to our lives that no one gets to escape. It even speaks of love in retrospect it speaks of love when it is absent. Sex is only the thrust (…lol…) of a narrative that encompasses love in its familial, lustful, and romantic forms. Duras is the eponymous lover, yes, but she also writes of her novel, “I don’t wish to paint a portrait of Indochina in 1930 I want to speak above all about what my youth was like.” She conjures love with fatalistic and unsentimental ceremony.
Maxine Hong Kingston writes in the introduction of this particular edition, “ In the end, Duras is the lover, and she shows us how to see and hear and love and leave Vietnam.” But I don’t agree with Kingston, not fully. It begs the question, then, why alter the truth? Why curate your experience so? He would threaten to kill her if she betrayed him, required detailed schedules of her activities and subjected her to “formal interrogations.”” Years later she still wondered: “How did I manage to overcome the kind of physical loathing I felt for Léo? The first time he kissed her, she felt ruined: “Ugliness had entered my mouth, I had communed with horror.” He could be cruel too, controlling and jealous. His face was badly pockmarked, his hands trembled, his mouth was unpleasantly large and loose. In reality, his name was Léo, and he revolted Duras.
“In The Lover, the older man has no name, but his skin smells like honey. For instance, take this quote from Parul Sehgal: The nationality of the lover changes between these individual accounts, as does other aspects of their courtship.
The novel is semi-autobiographical, written when Duras was seventy, but it is highly fictionalized she wrote of the same affair in her journals, and adapted it into another semi-autobiographical novel, The Lover From Northern China, which Duras referred to as a “reappropriation” of the initial text. The Lover, however, was her most widely-read (and highly-acclaimed) work – it won France’s Prix Goncourt in 1984. As with glass that’s been shattered, you handle this text carefully.ĭuras was a prolific writer, with a career that spanned six decades and over seventy novels, plays, and screenplays. It is only 117 pages, but it took me days to read because I had to skip backward and reread passages. What is written, though, is fragmentary and sharp, like shards of broken glass: pointed, glittering, able to draw blood. Those gaps, and what the reader draws from them, are as important to the novel as anything written, which can be a frustrating experience when you are accustomed to work that is more explicit in its revelations. Duras recounts her story by evoking it in paper thin layers, adding emotional texture and depth rather than offering narrative clarity, leaving for what is unsaid to be bridged by the reader.
The prose is constructed in a series of vignettes that interweave first and third person narration with a voice that undulates from the detached to the viscerally reactive. It is in this moment that the unnamed Chinese man, the man who would become her lover, approaches. The heat is blistering, and the quality of the day casts light in the same hue of her hat. She is crossing the Mekong River on an overcrowded ferry. Her dress is silk, and threadbare, a secondhand piece on loan from her mother. She wears make-up that’s been applied generously to her face, and gold lamé heeled shoes. Duras anchors us with an image: “It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.” She wears a men’s fedora, pink, with a black ribbon tied about the brim. The Lover is the story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a wealthy Chinese lover twelve years her senior, set in the prewar Saigon of Marguerite Duras’ childhood. But who’s to say what one would have had to do for it to be otherwise?” It could have been a real film, but no, it’s a sham.
“My life is a film that’s been dubbed, badly cut, badly acted, badly put together.