Our cherished memories lose part of their reality as we write them, rewrite them, and replay them in our attempts to relive them and hold on to them. There are contradictions in the text that always bother my students, but to me, these differences explore the concept of memory, how it changes, and how it works against us as time passes. In some interviews, Duras claimed the text was autobiographical, but the text is classified as a work of fiction. Truth is somewhat elusive in this powerful text. You will be taken on an incredible journey into a world that explores the very nature of memory, love, power, betrayal, and reconciliation. Feel the warm sun and the cool shade of the lovers’ love nest. Imagine the bustle and smells of the Cholen, the section of Saigon known as Chinatown. Let it wash over you like the waves along the Mekong. It is fuzzy at first, and the reader is disoriented. We are there when her brother dies, when her best friend leaves to get married, when she is excited about school, when she remembers her mother singing. The text invites the reader into her world. Instead, the story weaves around an aged narrator whose face has been ravaged by time and alcoholism and who reminisces about her “true” self and the infinite incarnations of that self throughout her life. The narrative, however, does not follow a linear train of thought. In fact, Duras’s writing style, characterized as l’écriture feminine by noted French feminist Hélène Cixous, creates a cloud-like world where time loses meaning. The open language, lapses, white spaces, and wide margins (in traditionally type-set editions) allow those who have been marginalized, those with no voices, to enter and speak. Our protagonists have no names, which creates a kind of slippage, allowing the reader to enter the text in a way. She loves her French roommate at boarding school. It is the story of love, yes, but also of survival and death: the girl survives her father’s death, an abusive family, the death of her beloved brother, and more.
(This is a generalization, but traditionally, the Chinese were, and perhaps still are, hated by the Vietnamese.) Or could it?Ĭould such a love be real? Could a poor little abused white girl in colonized Vietnam really fall in love with an older, rich and powerful rich Chinese man? Could he love her? Is this just a form of prostitution? After all, he gives her money to give her family, and he enjoys a sexual relationship with his would-be colonizer, reversing, challenging, and twisting traditional roles of race, power, and gender. These two broken and resilient people come from vastly different worlds. China’s colonization over Vietnam has been shattered by the French, and those people remaining are permitted to stay, in part because of their wealth or contributions.
She falls in love-or, if you don’t believe it’s love, has a torrid physical affair with-a rich, 27-year-old Chinese man. The Lover is the story of a poor, white, 15-year-old French girl living in French-colonized Indochina (present-day Vietnam) in the early 20 th century. Its theme of forbidden but powerful love continues to resonate with readers today. Written in 1984 and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, The Lover skyrocketed the already well-known Duras to international acclaim. Have you ever had a lover? Have you ever been a lover? Or, perhaps a better question, is there someone who is the love(r) of your life? Have you ever lived or dreamed a love so beautiful, so real, that it could not have possibly existed? Are you haunted by memories of what was or what could have been? Some nights, maybe only in your dreams, does that become your reality? Do you wonder what love really is? What it looks like? How it smells? How it feels? Reading L’Amant ( The Lover) by Marguerite Duras brings up these questions and more.
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