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    The Lover
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    The Lover
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    The Lover
    Ebook480 pages6 hours

    The Lover

    By Sylvia Plath

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    He's their secret admirer, wooing them with phone calls, love letters and special gifts.

    From a distance, he admires them. Desires them. Despises them. And when he gets close enough, he kills them all…

    Adams County, Alabama is the kind of town where everyone knows each other's business, the kind of place where doors stay unlocked. Until a psychopath comes calling.

    Dubbed 'The Secret Admirer', he woos his victims with phone calls, love letters and gifts, before stalking, kidnapping and then brutally murdering them.

    A terrifying game is underway. Sheriff Bernie Granger – in her first big case – is desperate to stop a twisted serial killer before another woman is slaughtered. But is she getting closer to catching him – or being drawn even deeper into his deadly web?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateSep 4, 2008
    ISBN9780007278909
    Author

    Sylvia Plath

    Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

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    Reviews for The Lover

    3.5/5

    1,101 ratings39 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Meh. I was not impressed. This is about a 15-year-old girl having an affair with a 27-year-old man. Nothing to write about except as a warning.
    • 3/5
      I think I need to see the movie to appreciate this book. I picked it up because I was traveling in Cambodia at the time and was in the area the film was made.
    • 4/5
      Autobiographical story of growing up in Vietnam. Her parents are teachers. The father dies and the mother stays. They are poor. The mother has a mental illness and doesn't really pay attention to the children. The oldest son steals everything from the family to support his drug habit. The girl, age 15, becomes a lover to a Chinese male.There is no connectivity to anything. She write emotionless and describes sex as something she is observing. Is she actually being sexually abused to support the family and no one does anything to stop it?
    • 2/5
      Ik weet niet wat het was, maar het lukte me gewoon niet om dit nochtans dunne boekje gelezen te krijgen. Misschien is het de filmische stijl van Duras.
    • 4/5
      This beautifully-written slender volume is neither conventional fictional novel nor usual factual autobiography. Rather, it is an intensely artistic narration by the author based on a number of isolated but significant periods and people from her life. The mode of telling is closest to stream-of-consciousness, as individually recollected scenes are frequently presented out of normal sequence in isolated and unconnected vignettes.Overall it is the story of a nameless French woman, arguably Duras herself who, as a 15-year-old teenager from a poor and dysfunctional French family, deliberately attracts the attention of a young man, scion of a wealthy Chinese family, in French Indo-China in the 1930s. Her original purpose might have been family support through child prostitution, but it develops that the man's wealth is not yet available to him and a torrid and illegal love affair develops instead. Or are they only "in lust," instead of "in love?" The reader will have to try to decide the question based only on the passionate events described; their individual feelings, passions and thoughts are artfully kept from the reader in the author's quirky manner of narrating only the exteriors of visible scenes.After a while the scene shifts as she leaves for school in Paris and spends the remainder of her life there. The unnnamed lover is left behind and a number of women from Duras' own life during WW II float onto center stage, again with narrative purpose difficult to discern.The story is difficult to follow, but close reading can reassemble the pieces in proper order. Nevertheless, this reader was left with the feeling that this was very much a story of self-revelation, told by a narrator who was reluctant to be revealed -- especially with respect to her inner feelings. If this oxymoronic nature of the story does not put you off, or you are up to reading literary puzzles posed by a famous author, then by all means accept the challenge of this book and enjoy pages and pages of beautiful narrative description of life and love in a past time and a historical place along the Mekong River.
    • 5/5
      "Women are no more than objects" has been a notion widespread throughout societies and time. Such civilizations acclaim progress and identity in the strength of men and the fragility of women. Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover roots from a world imbued in such societal standards. Duras steps into the internal and external plight of a young women going against the social grain through her utilization of the hero’s journey in an uncanny, non-linear memoir-structure. Through this technique interweaving prime individuation aspects of the hero’s journey – quintessentially through the stages of separation, initiation and return – alongside a structure becoming clearer with the novel’s progression, Duras essentially reverses the roles in society and enables the reader to peer into a girl’s pursuit of identity and womanhood.Separation constitutes the initial phase of this journey, taking fruition essentially from the girl’s deprived childhood and sudden call to adulthood viewed through the hectic, ever-changing frames of the beginning of the novel. The girl culminates from a depraved social viewpoint brought by social exclusion and from a confused personal outlook of life brought by familial exclusion. As the novel begins, the girl jumps back and forth through time between social standards and familial standards. Duras’ use of divided French-China Vietnam essentially gives the foundations for the girl’s social exclusion and despair. The girl lives a life of segregation and boundaries set up by society. From the very beginning as she boards the “native” bus, she sits “in the section reserved for white folks” (9). She stands as an outcast of society literally due to her race, initially thinking that acclimation with the world is forbidden. These social limitations restrain the protagonist, preventing her from exploring the world on her own, and are augmented by the familial restraints. Her relationship with her mother and family are defining of the character’s change through the novel. Like society, the detached mother traps the girl but through the structure of secondary education and a mathematics degree. The girl takes part in these futile attempts at her mother’s happiness, being crushed and changed by a mother living in “deep despondency” and focus of her brothers. Thus, through the mother’s dress and the pink fedora, the girl stands with an “ambiguity of image” as she crosses the threshold of the Mekong River, past which lay a freedom and road of her own trials.Crossing over from this other life, the girl begins her experimentation with life and discovery of herself in Saigon essentially through her sexual and intimate interactions with the man from Cholon, embodying the goddess in the hero’s journey. The weak man represents this rich, idealized life for the girl, over whom and which she has control. Duras’ reversal of role in this time brings the protagonist to a new level of power and understanding. As the girl lies in bed in his studio, she dictates the sex, as she “draws him to her and starts to undress him” (38). In telling him to do with her as he does with other women, she places him into an inferior, weaker position – later leading him to cry – and takes control over her standing in both society and her personal life. She further uses this goddess in taking her to Chinese restaurants and treating her family to dinners, all the while being accepting and appeased with the fact that the relationship will never go to marriage, due to the weak man’s, like civilization’s women’s, stresses by his father and society. As their relationship continues over the course of a year and a half, the girl continues to gain power, eventually accepting her mother’s position with her brothers’ deaths and gaining closure with her mother’s acceptance of this uncanny, empowering behavior (79,97). Even the quintessential marker of her mother’s and society’s rule, the boarding school, becomes “a hotel” which she controls and through which she comes and goes. The girl takes the form of the stereotypical man, having the characteristics of power, yet detachment. Being looked upon as a prostitute by society means nothing to her, even to the point that she is urged to deflower society’s beautiful and innocent Helene. Thus, through these relationships, she gains a newfound viewpoint on her place in her own society and finds her own identity.Upon her return from this world back to France, however, the girl gains the true apotheosis and becomes a master of two worlds. Duras essentially breaks with the grain of society to show that even this traditional outlook that manly behavior dominates society has its flaws. As the girl makes her departure back to her world, she understands these traditions and structures and becomes accepting of her break from them. Moreover, the meaning of the story also comes from her final cries of love for the man of Cholon. What Duras essentially does in this final phase of the journey is not so much as question the protagonist’s social actions, but to question her personal actions and viewpoints. Her strength and goal-oriented viewpoint are enough to become socially content with herself, but not to become personally content with herself. The intimacy with the man plays a role in her defining moment and serves as the final realization of the story of love breaking beyond such socially dictated boundaries and norms. Empathy and love are the other half in finding personal contentment. Through this writing, the girl becomes content and finds her identity in having loved and lost through actions motivated by her own will, lastly being happy with the later encounter with the man.This finding of flow and linearity through this stream of consciousness and hero’s journey allows Duras to show meaning and life away from traditional boundaries. The girl finds herself through the role reversals and breaking with society’s norm. Not just by becoming the societal counterpart through her manly actions, but by also gaining an understanding of compassion and linear thought through the love and contentment she gains with her relationships. Thus, the novel is an uncanny feminist novel about going against the grain of society and finding yourself through your own notions of strength and compassion. Though it may be difficult to read, the fruit lies in its labor.
    • 4/5
      brilliant, spare language, but sad
    • 5/5
      A story of a young girl in French Indochina, her Chinese lover, and her family, The Lover collapses barriers and distinctions until love, cruelty, pleasure, and madness all seem like different names for the same emotional concentrate. Sounds melodramatic—but in fact, Duras undertakes this project with eerie, almost morbid detachment. I'd say it's more terrifying than erotic, but I'm no longer sure that there's a meaningful difference between the two.
    • 3/5
      I was very interested in reading The Lover after having watched the film and glad to enjoy the same tone of sadness and desire. I did find it a bit hard to follow at times and with an odd flip flopping of point of view, which I assume is intentional. This book is supposedly autobiographical and I imagine that Duras writes from the past as if seeing a ghost or image of herself, and uses "the girl" or "I" interchangeably. If you want something short, unique, and sensual on a rainy summer day, this is it.
    • 5/5
      "Very early in my life it was too late."The Lover by Marguerite Duras is a powerfully moving meditation on identity and death. Although prose, it is nearly poetic in form, and exceptionally poetic in tone and imagery. Framed by two Stygian boat rides, the first into "the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal," the narrator hypnotizes the reader with an elegy for herself, for a lover, for her brother:“People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such—it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle. Certain people may harbor it, on condition they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Just as certain other people may detect its presence in them, on the same condition, that they don’t know they can. It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void. Look at the dead sands of the desert, the dead bodies of children: there’s no path for immortality there, it must halt and seek another way.”It is so rewarding and easy to get lost in Barbara Bray’s translation of Duras’s language, whether the narrator is sharing her impressions of the evil in her family, her lover’s desperation, her classmate’s breasts, the rivers of Asia, or the memories of rooms and sounds. This may be one of the most consistently sad narratives I have ever read, but it delivers the cumulative effect of a cleansing meditation. It’s the kind of book that when you finish it, you make a mental note to have yourself read it again at some later point in your life. I suppose one could read this book from various perspectives, whether feminist or colonial or whatever, but let me encourage you to simply lose yourself in a heartbreaking lament for the intense privacy of our lives and the ineffable sadness of our deaths.
    • 2/5
      Did nothing for me. Felt like a loose sketch for a novel which was never completed. Some questionable writing too (perhaps a translation issue?). For example "Going back to Saigon I feel I'm going on a journey, especially when I take the bus, and this morning I've taken the bus"... Yeesh.
    • 4/5
      I loved this novella. The Lover is about the reflections of an older Parisian woman on pivotal moments in her adolescence both in Saigon and Paris. Except, true to life but rare in novels, these events are hazy, misremembered and haphazard and her recollections jump around from memory to aside to self-analysis. I found myself waiting for the things I knew she would not tell me. Duras gives us enough to keep us hooked but leaves you with a great many questions.Her style is moreish and I really admire the delicate handling of growing up around domestic instability and this child's precociousness and vulnerability. The Lover is a masterclass in how to do an awful lot with deceptively sparse writing.
    • 4/5
      Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a young girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home to her boarding school in Saigon. She meets the son of a Chinese businessman and becomes his lover. Reading it, you feel you are looking at a dark-hued portrait of lovers embracing surrounded by a mysterious and impenetrable jungle of blackness. It is a ravishingly beautiful work of art that has a dream-like quality.
    • 4/5
      Its an emotional book, shocking and at times a slightly disturbing book. But I continiued to read, wanting to know more and more. Hoping that the end was what I hoped. It wasn't, but that didnt stop me from enjoying this book.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful!
    • 3/5
      I didn't love The Lover, but as a fan of all things Vietnamese I'm glad I read this semi-autobiographical story of Duras growing up in French Indochina. The loose, episodic narrative--about a teenage girl, her unstable family, and her older Chinese lover--requires some comfort with ambiguity as well as patience to put the pieces of the plot together. The narrator somehow manages to be emotionally overwrought and indifferent at the same time; an American reader is likely to find her exceptionally French. But to Duras' credit, The Lover is knowingly brief and often poetic; it feels something like an experimental but successful prose poem.
    • 5/5
      This novella is absolutely beautifully written. The prose is akin to poetry. This is a story of sexual awakening, of family and culture, set in Viet Nam during French colonization. Magnificent!
    • 1/5
      Marguerite Duras’ novel was extremely hard to follow due to its structure throughout the entire novel. Along with the structure being very difficult and picturesque it was also a weird story due to its close to pedophiliac sex scenes. The way the story is set up makes the novel hard to follow because its lack of a linear story line. It jumps around from different periods in time and describes the same scene in different ways in different parts of the story. This structure in a novel is hailed by some critics and it is very useful for describing memory sequences and trying to describe how the mind works. The mind is never linear and jumps all over the place but even still this type of writing is confusing and doesn’t work well in this novel. Also throughout the novel, Duras changes from 1st person to the 3rd person during certain aspects of the novel. These parts occur during the sexual encounters between the main character who is 15 years old and a 27 year old Chinese man. It changed from the 1st person to the 3rd person due its graphicness in the memory of the author. This change allows her to look back at the experience and realize what she did from another standpoint. It’s like looking back on an awkward moment in high school and laughing about it when your older and Duras uses the switch from 1st person to 3rd. These switches are useful in some ways yet overall it made the novel extremely hard to follow and overall the novel was boring.The other aspect that made this novel disturbing was the sex scenes and the premise behind this novel. The main character which remains nameless throughout the novel is 15 years old during the novel. Her lover is a 27 year old Chinese businessman. Even though the sex was consensual and there wasn’t any rape or sexual crimes committed, it was a little too weird to read about. The novel is the memory of the author and her life growing up and how she did really love the Chinese man. Even still this is extremely pedophiliac of the Chinese man and shouldn’t be going on in society. Sex as a 15 year old even with two people of the same age should still be frowned upon due to the youth of the kids. The media portrays sex so much that kids are being desensitized by it and believe it is a normal occurrence for kids in the 9th grade. Shows like MTV’s Skins or Gossip Girl and 90210 which are targeted for the pre-teen to young teens present sex in such a nonchalant way that it seems normal for kids to be having sex when they are 15 years old. All being said the girl seems to be making love with the person she loves but this person is 12 years older than she is. This type of novel brings in taboos about sex and yet it wasn’t interesting rather it was creepy and weird. In conclusion, Duras’ novel is very difficult read due to its poor writing style and creepy sex scenes. If one looks at the novel knowing what they’re about to get into then it is completely understandable to love this novel. However, it basically puts the reader to sleep by confusing them throughout the novel and it’s hard to follow along with the story line due to the switching back and forth and random descriptions about people who show up for only a few moments. It tries to tie the reader into the mind of the author by using this different structure yet it also pulls the reader away from the novel completely due to its lack of a linear storyline. All in all it was a very tough novel to get through and would not recommend it to others.
    • 2/5
      Shades of Lolita. Gag.
    • 5/5
      A little book, barely 100 pages, packed with so much emotion and imagery i don't even know how to describe it. It is intense, in a way i haven't read in a while. Technically it is a story of a very poor French teenager, in Vietnam in the 1920's, who takes as her lover a wealthy Chinese man. Character-wise, he doesn't seem much more than a boy himself, though he is in his late 20's. But we get so much more information about the girl's life than we do about her affair. We hear about her mother, essentially a crazy woman, about both her brothers and their lives and deaths. The girl, who never gives her name, is weirdly detached from everyone but seems to be able to understand people deeply. The descriptions are lush and exotic. It seems to be a novel full of yearning and need. I am going to put it aside for a month or so and then read it again to see how i feel about it then.
    • 3/5
      I believe we all have memories like these – distant, random, mixed with pain, mixed with joy, a purposeful vagueness that is possibly self-induced. The thoughts are disclosed like word-puke, somewhat jumbled, non-linear, occasionally repetitive as though to reinforce the thought, colored with poetic prose, incomplete but the feeling is confirmed. This is what I felt reading Duras’ ‘The Lover’, an autobiographical novel of her youth in Saigon, particularly of her Lover.It’s 1929. The fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl is in Saigon with her mom, a headmistress in a local school who is a manic-depressive widow, an elder brother who is violent, cruel, and a thief, and an elder brother who is referred to as ‘younger brother’ who is kind and gentle but lives in fear of the elder brother’s fist. They are broke and are known as the ‘layabouts’. On a ferry, the girl meets a 30-something wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese that evolves into a year and a half affair. Though wealthy, he is controlled by his father who owns the family’s money and forbids any consideration of their union. The affair ends when she leaves Saigon returning to France. The emotions are complex as I am sure it was for Duras then and at the time of writing (published in 1984) and for the reader. Needless to say, there is an ickiness with the underage relationship. But it’s more than that with a certain amount of reciprocation and desire on her part – he was her temporary (hours at a time) escape from her reality. She is not seeking pity, yet her words draw you into her darkness. There is an economy of words in her lack of details, but there is also an excess of words to provide a certain dreaminess, that poetic feeling. But as the reader, we know there is nothing pleasant here and that just adds to the ickiness. The narrator speaks of “I”, but also regularly speaks of the protagonist in the third person – the girl, the white girl, the girl with a man’s hat, as though these memories are detachments and denials, not of hers, not of her fifteen to seventeen-year-old self. She also wrote of her lust for her beautiful classmate, her best friend, lusting of her body, of her breasts. She recognizes her own sexual ‘perverseness’ but ignores her sexual confusion. Perhaps the above is what makes this an award-winning book – that a nearly seventy-year old self can converge her complex teenage years into a haunting tale. Alas, it is not for me. Lastly, I was annoyed with the stereotype description of the Chinese male, his lack of masculinity, his softness, his weeping. Even though I know it’s her truth and likely the truth of that time, it’s still rather off-putting. Some quotes:On Beauty – and it’s one heck of a pickup line for a mature lady:“One day, when I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” On Desire:“You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glace or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.”
    • 4/5
      THE LOVER, a novel by Marguerite Duras, is a book I've had on my to-read list ever since I read a review of the film adaptation more than twenty years ago. The book is probably autobiographical fiction, since I have read that almost all of Duras's books are based on her own life. The book was first published in 1984 and Duras died in 1996.While I can visualize this as a very beautiful and hauntingly erotic film, the book itself seemed to me very disjointed and often redundant, as the unnamed French narrator tells of her affair, between the ages of 15 and 17, with a moneyed Chinese businessman a dozen years older. The story is set in French colonial Vietnam in the 1930s, but the narrator is telling it from a vantage point of more than fifty years later, and makes frequent references to the War years and beyond, as she unwinds the multilayered story of her very poor and dysfunctional family - a seriously bipolar mother and two older brothers, the oldest of whom is portrayed as irredeemably evil. The central story, however, revolves around the affair. There have, of course, been countless books written about such relationships, LOLITA being perhaps the most famous, but Duras's tale has a unique, dreamlike quality about it, which is both fascinating and annoying, probably because of its redundancy and frequent leaps forward and backward in time.The setting is important to the book, and was even more important in the film adaptation, I suspect, as Duras describes the beauty of the countryside around Sadec, where the girl lives with her family, the Mekong Delta and the river that separates Sadec from the girls' school she attends in Saigon. And there is the crowded squalor of Cholon, Saigon's sprawling and bustling Chinatown, the location of the flat where the lover takes the girl for their frequent assignations.But it is the eroticism itself that leaps out at you. The way the lover gently washes her before and after they make love. The lovemaking itself varies in its methods. Sometimes it seems dangerous -"He's torn off the dress. He throws it down. He's torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed ..." Or sometimes very gentle, as inthe way the girl describes her lover's body: "The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ... he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex ... She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love."One wonders too about the exact nature of the narrator's sexual preferences, because of a passage where she describes a schoolmate, Helene Lagonelle, who, although older, may be a bit simple - "... her skin's as soft as that of certain fruits ... These flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them, and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I'd like to eat Helene Lagonelle's breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I'd like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers."Erotic? Definitely. Obscene? No, not at all. My guess is that it is the delicious eroticism of the story that has made it a minor classic in France and Europe. Perhaps you have to be French to fully appreciate THE LOVER. I didn't love this book, but I'm glad I finally read it. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 1/5
      Autobiographischer Roman Duras', Rahmenhandlung bildet die Sexbeziehung der damals fünfzehnjährigen Autorin mit einem mehr als doppelt so alten chinesischen Millionärssohn im zum französischen Kolonialreich gehörenden Indochina vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg.Das Buch ist den tollen Kritiken zum Trotz eine Enttäuschung auf der ganzen Linie: Zusammenhanglos aneinandergereihte Erinnerungsfetzen aus frühester Kindheit der Autorin bis ins heute lassen einen Erzähl- und Spannungsbogen vermissen, vieles bleibt offen und ungeklärt. Wer den Roman übrigens (wie ich) im Zusammenhang zur Einstimmung auf einen Südostasienurlaub lesen will, wird übrigens genauso enttäuscht: Er könnte genauso gut in den Vereinigten Staaten oder in Djibouti spielen, kulturelle Einflüsse Indochinas, Lokalkolorit, exotische Stimmung oder zumindest nachvollziehbare Kulisse sucht man vergebens...Übrigens kein Vergleich zur Verfilmung des Stoffs von Jean-Jacques Annaud aus dem Jahr 1992, in diesem Fall ist der Film deutlich besser als das literarische Original....
    • 3/5
      My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don't look at him either. They can't. They're incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they'd be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society.

      There are a plethora of splendid reviews of The Lover by my GR friends. Read those. My own reactions were of a lower cut, more bruised and bottom shelf. I found the novel to be one of shame. Take the girl and her situation, colonials on the down and out. There is a great deal of local color but, the characters find themselves clinging to the short side of the stick. A great poet once said, "I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home." Their failure is malignant. It clings to their clothes and hazes their spoiled breath. I found the erotic to be negligible as well, a clingy despair in contrast to the angelic breasts of the protagonist's schoolmate. There's a wisdom in that, I suppose, however ephemeral. Duras succeeds in making the reader uncomfortable. The framing dynamic is between the older Chinese man and the fifteeen year old protagnist, wry in her man's hat and gold shoes. That relationship is outflanked by the Naturalisti images Duras weaves of Parisian garrets and the familial failures of dissipation.

      My year of reading (mostly French) women continues in pace with a philosophy of the here and now. This was a detour of benefit.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing, fascinating, and real. Marguerite mixes times, events, feelings but all in a captivating form, never loosing the readers interest.
    • 1/5
      Keeping an open mind to literature, movies or any other medium has always been my approach to putting myself in a story. I went into this novel having high expectations, not extremely high, just averagely high. However for most of the novel I had no idea what was going on. I was at a total loss throughout the whole thing. As soon as Marcuerite Duras wrote about this girl’s run-in with a wealthy Chinese man, who was considerably older then her I had somewhat of an idea to where the novel was going. To my dull surprise I learned what had already happened in I think the next couple of paragraphs. It’s like the story began and finished within maybe the first twenty pages or less and then in continued on. I felt like the book was telling me, “Hey you know the story already and now I’m going to give you some random facts about this girl’s life, whether you like it or not.” Needless to say, like it I did not!Considering the page count, which is very small to begin with, I honestly believe this could’ve been a short story. I was not a fan of the out of order stream of conscious writing. Although I do like reading novels that happen within the character’s head, I just need continuity! I can accept flashbacks since flashbacks further the story. However this book did not contain flashbacks. I don’t even know what it contained. The honest feeling I got while reading the novel was me, stuck in this little, big or whatever girl’s head. The girl had to sneeze and I was blown out of her nose but at the last minute she plugged her nostrils. Then I was hurled back inside her brain, somebody turned on the flush and was spun out of control. I had to push myself to be free of this woman.Well with that out of the way I guess the next thing to address is the sexuality. What I mostly do not understand is where all the sex is in this book? Not that I care to see it. Although again, I came into the book thinking, “oh great so basically I’m reading a porno.” Well it wasn’t, and there might have been lines in the book where she wrote, “and he caressed me and we made love”. That is all I could remember from this shambled book. Actually there was one scene where she talked about her lover washing her after they first had sex and she was a virgin. Although I’m not sure why that was necessary in the book. It served no purpose at all. She had already stated before that it hurt when the first did it so we really did not need that particular scene. It just furthers my frustration with the book.I would much rather read Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” again then have to read this shamble of a book. After I read Androids I sat back in my chair or bed or wherever I was and thought about it for a while. I absolutely did not do that with “The Lover”. In fact I’m almost positive I threw it down on the ground and never touched it again. Actually, I’m positive I did this because right before I wrote this review, I picked it up from underneath my bed along with some of my dirty clothes.In conclusion I am not a fan of “The Lover” although I won’t hold it against you if you do happen to like it. It is just not my thing. If you love romances and weird out of order writing, then go ahead and jump into this story and read it, reflect on it, review it and etc. Just promise me one thing. Do not talk to me about it.
    • 3/5
      Hmm, I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's an easy read ... the paperback is only 117 pages, and the language is not difficult. It's written beautifully, but I felt very detached from the main character, as though I couldn't quite "get" her and everything she was trying to express. I enjoyed reading this, but it left me puzzled. It's worth checking out, and it may greatly impact you and strike you as a "work of literary genius" (from the back cover). Or, it might not. I think this one depends on who you, the reader, are, and on the experiences you have had.
    • 4/5
      Marguerite Duras' style hasn't sat well with me in the past (I couldn't fathom "Hiroshima Mon Amour"), but it's eerily effective here at transmitting the pain of memories too delicate to examine closely, too powerful to be ignored. It's a short work but not easily penetrated; my way was greatly eased for having seen the movie adaptation.French-occupied southeast Asia, pre-WWII: a young French girl enters a liaison with a wealthy Chinese man. I thought I knew this story, but the novel goes considerably more in-depth with the girl's family. As semi-autobiography, it felt like the author was recalling scattered images in hopes of piecing together a whole picture that explained how she survived such a chaotic life. Some memories seem almost incidental, e.g. running from the madwoman - unless taken symbolically. She flees the madwoman at age eight as she would flee the threat of descending into madness herself almost ten years later. Her own mother is mentally unwell, there is little about her family that is normal, and she has nothing to cling to and no one to rely on. Her lover offers some respite, though he is hardly a refuge. She revels in their shared moments together, but perceives his weakness and feels no protection. The movie led me to believe this was a story primarily about mistaking love's identity, not recognizing it until too late. The novel is something more complex, portraying the basking in another's proffered love as grasping at a tenuous lifeline, a means of survival.
    • 4/5
      The Lover treads lines been between enigmatic and thready, subtle and shallow, frustrating as hell and heaven in a book. Fortunately, it came out on the right side of the lines for my tastes. Readers of Gide and Colette will probably like, or even love, Duras's novella.
    • 2/5
      I saw the movie first and loved it so much that I bought the book, as one learns more about the characters, in print, rather than on screen. But the book proved disappointing. Still I am glad I read it because it was the source of the beautifully projected movie. Seemed like the characters were just flowing like leaves in flood water having no power over their own lives leaving everything to fate except maybe the Chinese man's passion and obsession with the girl; but again he was helpless to take the reins of his life in his own hands and so succumbed to the wishes of his father and society.