Always the first departures over the sea. In so doing she notes the passage of time during her life. The passage is written from the 70 year old’s angle. It’s pre-empted by the lover’s incapacity to make love to the now 16 year old because she’s leaving, his father forbids him to marry her and he’s obeyed. There’s a fabulous passage on ships and departure.
By the end of the book I was, however, being nudged towards the end of the affair – but not of the love – between the white girl and the Chinese man and towards the girl and her family’s departure from colonial Indo-China to France. The situation – it’s hard to know what else to call it – is thus explored from so many different angles that I was surprised to find linear time featuring at all. She doesn’t hand the camera to the brothers. She hands it to the other human being who’s always around, the inclusive ‘you’ in English. She hands the camera to white up-country bigots and to the languishing Chinese lover. She hands the camera to herself at different ages, and records shifts on the spectrum between the interior ‘I’ and the exterior ‘she’. Just as the girl distances herself from her lover, Duras distances herself from the girl by reminding us that she’s writing about an image, many layers of image are possible, especially because the mind accumulates images over time – Duras was 70 when she wrote the book – and people compose themselves, congeal themselves, for the camera. It prowls around the protagonist and her lovers like a leopard or a photographer.
#The lover duras plot series#
It’s a series of sections and paragraphs. The Lover is without subject or plot or any stable points of view or predictable verb tense or a singular frame. The girl’s intelligence is the book’s subject as much as the lovers’ bodies are.īut this is a novel that came out of the nouveau roman movement, which crystallised the writer’s desire to say what isn’t said. Physical passion is equalled by that peculiarly human passion, the mix of thought and feeling some call rationality, some call poetry and others call intelligence. The title, however, concentrates the word into a single lover: the scion of a rich Chinese family who plucks the 15 year old white trash off the Mekong river ferry in 1920s Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – and drops her into his chauffeur-driven car, thence to his flat. Her mother, her younger brother, her older brother, whom she hates, an anti-lover, her beautiful school friend.
It flings its protagonist about in time/space with a passion equal to the lover’s passion – and she, the lover and the beloved, loves many people. The Lover is about love unto death, since love can go in no other direction.
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