The Lover

“Lover” is one of my least favourite words in the English language.  I hate it.  The idea that love and sex are inextricably linked just rankles with me in a way that’s quite visceral and I find difficult to explain.  In short, I wasn’t off to a great start with Marguerite Duras’s book.  As a result, I’m going to ignore pretty much all of the sex bits.  The romantic relationship is the least interesting bit anyway.  It’s actually fairly easy to just ignore the shagging as there’s a whole bunch in the novel about familiar love rather than the eros kind.

The Lover is about much more than sex.  Even the sexual relationship isn’t just about sex.  It’s about gold-digging and (apparently) love.  It is mostly about gold-digging, though.  A young French woman (read: school girl) has an affair with a much older man while she’s in Saigon with her mother and two brothers.  It’s sort of a coming of age story, but there’s a real level of creepy age difference that is best ignored.  She’s still in school and the guy’s buying her diamonds; it’s all kinds of inappropriate and our protagonist’s mother’s cheering her on.  Anyway, this teenage girl sleeps with an older man and he gives her money.  It’s not okay.  This continues for a while until richbags realises that his gold-digger is not Chinese and really isn’t the sort of girl that you bring home to Mum so things really need to end.  He does rock up a few years later when she’s back in Paris and actually age appropriate, but it’s really not a part of their affair. 

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, it’s the family that I care about.  Duras refuses to give any of her characters names and it works so well in relation to her mother and brothers.  Throughout the book she refers to them as, “my mother,” “my older brother,” “my younger brother,” and it’s so effective. What Duras does with this technique is create a brilliant sense of distance between the protagonist and her family.  While we’re being told that she doesn’t care about them, that she can go a decade without speaking to them, it’s hammered home by their namelessness.  The fact that Duras does this also dulls the impact of their deaths.  It’s hard to give a crap about a random, penniless gambler.  The namelessness gives the whole of The Lover a strange transitory nothingness; even the siblings seem to be interacting as ships in the night.

I did enjoy this book, but I’m finding it difficult to write about.  It is a book that I found it quite difficult to motivate myself to read. It’s perfectly enjoyable when you’re actually reading it but it has this narrative that just drifts along like silk on a breeze.  There is just so little that drives the plot forward.  The non-linear narrative only heightens this.  There is no urgency to read on and the fact that you already know what happens means that by and large you don’t really need to read on.  As much as I hate to quote my mother in these things, it is incredibly French.

I’m now moving on to Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.  I am so excited; I’ve been waiting to read it for ages.