The Lover is a fictionalised biographical work by Duras,
recounting her first love affair with an older Chinese man during her childhood
in Indochina. Duras was fifteen when the affair began, an affair deemed illicit
due to her age and their difference in race. The novel captures the period
during which the affair ran its course, though in truth its range is broader
than that, capturing the period as a kind of distillation of the course of
Duras’s life. It is apparent the affair had a significant impact on her, and
the novel gives a very frank assessment of that period and its consequences.
Duras writes with sparse economy and a keen, insightful
wisdom. There is a great deal unsaid in the book, and yet a complete picture is
given of the relationship, its flaws, Duras as a naïve yet calculating young
lover. It is quite a disturbing read, not because of the nature of the
relationship, their age difference and racial differences, but the ways in
which the young Duras takes advantage of her lover, treats him badly and, to a
degree, herself, the level of hatred and dismissal from both herself and her
family against the backdrop of his reverence and gentleness. The lover is from
a rich family, he cannot marry Duras both because she will not allow it and
because his father will not either. Duras, in contrast, lives in poverty. Her
father has died and her mother has lost what money they had on a bad land deal,
her elder brother is a drain (she refers to him, often, as the ‘murderer’ due
to her perception of his guilt in the younger of the two brothers’ death which
occurs after the time frame in which the story is set) and the younger brother
seems unfit for study though it is apparent Duras loves him greatly. That at
fifteen Duras sets out, it appears, to find herself a rich lover in order to
supplement their income, perhaps, is not surprising and though the family
openly disapprove, on another level her behaviour is sanctioned. As she
explains:
“The only thing left
is this girl, she’s growing up, perhaps one day she find a way to bring in some
money. That’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child
prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest
people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother
smile.”
There’s a strange directness and indirectness to this novel.
On the one hand much is left out, a great deal is unsaid. On the other hand,
there is a brutal kind of honesty, Duras does not shirk from laying
responsibility for her behaviour at her own door. She admits how terribly she
treated her lover, how she used him, how mercenary she was, how he knew it, how
her family knew it, how the affair had no future and no end, how she did not
love him (or thought she didn’t) how it marked and damaged them both, in
Duras’s case for life it seems. Is it something she is sorry for? Yes, the
novel professes her sorrow, not for the relationship but perhaps for the way it
was conducted and the way that it ended. As she says:
“And I’ll always have
regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good
and bad, the bus, the bus-driver I used to laugh with, the old woman chewing
betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in
Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence.”
All through the novel, Duras’s perceptiveness, her wisdom,
shines through. It is a piece of fiction / non-fiction in which each paragraph
provides its own weight, could be read, interpreted, analysed in great depth.
It is a slight book, yet one which benefits from more than one reading due to
its density, a density which is not apparent due to the sparse simplicity of
Duras’s prose. In fact it is very easy to read the book lightly, to dismiss it
as a simple love story. It is so much more than that. It is, I think, an
explanation of Duras’s life in which she addresses her flaws, her difficulties,
why and how she drank, why and how she turned to writing, how she manipulated
herself and others, her independence, her single-mindedness, the terrible way
in which she shaped her life story. Except there is no life story, as she says
here:
“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.
It is a melancholy book, filled with regret. At the same
time it is defiant. Duras does not express any desire to have lived any other
way, she seeks only to explore the fundamental truth of her existence; a truth
she has buried in a childhood half forgotten, brought to life again in this
short, but impactful novel. Her life encapsulated in a single image, the image
of herself at fifteen crossing the Mekong river, her lover-to-be on the other
side.
The Lover receives a confused but impressed 8 out of 10
Bii’s.
