If that is a form of prostitution, she can live with it. Surprisingly, the affair does not terribly worry the mother, who sees it as a means to an end: her daughter’s lover is wealthy, so he may be able to help the impoverished family with money. And even he, instead of thinking himself honoured, doesn’t want her for his son. They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles.
Don’t tell me that hat’s innocent, or the lipstick, it all means something, it’s not innocent, it means something, it’s to attract attention, money.
SCHMOOP THE LOVER DURAS HOW TO
The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter. The clothes she wears are enough to show. The rumour mill goes into overdrive:įifteen and a half. Later that week he picks her up from school to show her where he lives, and from there a sexual relationship ensues. Hélène is returning to boarding school in Saigon from a holiday and is crossing the Mekong Delta by ferry. They talk on the boat and then he gives her a lift in his chauffeured limousine. She often dresses provocatively - a threadbare silk dress that is sleeveless and low-cut, with a leather belt, gold lame high heels and a man’s Fedora hat - because she feels confident in these kinds of clothes. Yet she realises this attire makes the “girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed” and “might make people laugh”.īut it is exactly this outfit that catches the eye of the Chinese financier, who later becomes her lover. This hardens Hélène, who blames this lack of care for the death of her younger brother, who succumbs to pneumonia, and it also makes her ashamed.įrom the outset, it’s clear that Hélène is unsure of her own identity. The daughter does not think she is good at mathematics, but she excels at French and wants to be a writer.īut that’s not the only strain in their relationship. The mother often goes through periods of despair - I suspect an undiagnosed clinical depression - and locks herself away, despondent and unable to properly care for her family. In the novel, the narrator, who effortlessly flicks between first and third person, has a strained relationship with her mother, who wants her daughter to do well at school, to get an education and to study mathematics. Duras also claimed to have been beaten by her mother and her older brother. But things did not go well: her father quickly returned to France, where he died soon after, and her mother, a school teacher, made a bad property investment in the colony, which mired them in poverty. It’s largely based on the author’s own life - she was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to French parents who had emigrated there to work in the French colony. The Lover is narrated by Hélène Lagonelle, a French woman looking back on her life in Indochina (now Vietnam) and, in particular, the romance she had with a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 when she was just 15. I read it back to back with another (supposedly) sensual novel, the (rather horrid) Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, and they couldn’t be further apart - in mood, style or sheer literary power - even though they covered similar (sexual) territory.
So begins Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, an evocative and sensual novel about a young girl’s affair with a man 12 years her senior, which was first published in 1984.
Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. He introduced himself and said: “I’ve known you for years. One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. Fiction – Kindle edition Harper Perennial 130 pages 2006.
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