Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996), known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914, in Gia Định, Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam). Her parents, Marie (née Legrand, 1877–1956) and Henri Donnadieu (1872–1921), were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School.
In 1931, when she was 17, Duras and her family moved to France where she successfully passed the first part of the baccalaureate with the choice of Vietnamese as a foreign language, as she spoke it fluently. Duras returned to Saigon in late 1932 where her mother found a teaching post. There, Marguerite continued her education at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat and completed the second part of the baccalaureate, specializing in philosophy.
Duras was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays, and works of short fiction, including her best-selling, highly fictionalized autobiographical work L’Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover, which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese-Vietnamese man. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other books: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, was released in 1992.
(Wikipedia)
Duras Returns to the Threshold
In rewriting the lover, she also rewrites herself, her origin as writer, in a precarious zone shuttling between past and future and back again.
- Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Duras Videos
Marguerite Duras – Worn Out With Desire To Write (1985):
A Celebration of Marguerite Duras with Kate Zambreno and Emma Ramadan:
THE LOVER by Maguerite Duras:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras | Reading the French Classics:
The Lover – Official Movie Trailer:
The lover takes the narrator and her family to dinner, where her brothers “gorge themselves without saying a word to him” (50). They go on to a night club: “We all order Martells and Perrier. My brothers drink them straight off and order the same again. [. . .] But they still don’t speak to him” (53). Martell and Perrier are both imports from France—by contrast, and for all his European clothing and moneyed sophistication, when he and his driver are on their own, the lover drinks arrack (103), a distilled liquor made in India and Sri Lanka, as well as Southeast Asia and Indonesia, but hard to find elsewhere. By forcing him to buy them fine imported cognac—Martell is the oldest of the “big four” cognac houses—and drinking it to excess, the narrator’s brothers are both rubbing his nose in their privilege, by squandering his wealth, but also revealing their dependence upon his resources. No wonder they cannot bring themselves to say a word about it.
Duras Questions
The following questions are taken from your blog posts…
What was your favorite quote from the book?
What did you think about the going back and forward in time throughout the novel?
What’s your honest opinion on the protagonist and her lover?
What do you think about the changing opinions of the mother on her children?
Structure and narrative
How did you feel about the structure of this book? Did you think it made the book more engaging to read or were you did it lose you in its complexity?
If you could title this work differently, what would you title it?
Why does the narrative switch between first person and third person?
How does the non-linear narrative structure impact your engagement with the story? Does it enhance or complicate your understanding of Ana María’s life?
The ending of the novel illustrates the scene where the man phones Duras and expresses his love for her. How might the sense of irresolution enhance our analysis of Duras’ relationship with the man?
Family dynamics
What role does family dynamics play in shaping our personalities as we grow up or how important it is to have stable relationships with our family members for our overall development?
How do the book’s characters handle the difficulties and limits brought on by poverty?
What does her younger brother’s death mean to her?
Is there anyway to reconcile the fact that her family knew about the young girl’s relationship and did not directly intervene?
Do you think the girl’s family dynamics affected her sense of self and her relationships with others?
The lovers relationship
Do you believe this relationship is equal? Do you think the young girl actually held any significant power over the man?
How did you feel reading this novel, knowing the age gap between the Chinaman and the girl?
What are your thoughts on the portrayal of the relationship in “The Lover?” How does the novel depict the complexities of power dynamics, societal expectations, and racial dynamics?
How does age play a role in dynamics here? If she had been closer to him in age would that have changed the dynamic at all?
Whether or not you think Duras and her lover actually loved each other, or if it was only desire or something else?
Do you think the desire that Duras felt for her lover was fueled only by his wealth or could it have been true love?
Who do you think held the power in their relationship?
“Throughout our affair, for a year and a half, we’d talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first we knew we couldn’t possibly have any future in common, so we’d never speak of the future, we’d talk about day-to- day events, evenly, hitting the ball back and forth.” (49)
Let’s hypothesize! If the relationship did cross the barriers, where do you think the two would end up? Is it happy and fulfilling? Or do they go their separate ways? (In other words, do you think the relationship would really last?)
“I am worn out with desire for Helene Lagonelle.” (73). This piqued my interest as it added another layer to Duras and made me wonder if this was sexual desire or maybe a desire in the same way she is “possessed” by the man from Cholon? I would love to hear what you all think about it!
In the end, the Chinese man manages to express his love years later, and my question for everyone is, how do you interpret this ending? Do you view this as a tragedy full of regrets or a completion of their complex love story?
What exactly does it mean to love a person? Do you think it is true romantic love if one gets into a relationship based on a financial necessity?
It appears that the girl harboured a love/hate relationship with her family, especially her mother. How do you think the girl’s family influenced her life’s choices in relationships, education, and prospects? Do you think she would have continued the relationship with the Chinese man if her family wasn’t a factor in her life?
Would the book have been as successful without such a significant age gap?
How is the archetype of a “Lover” used to redefine Duras’s experiences? Can we argue that she is acting in opposition to this role? Or is she perhaps commenting on those loves that are not romantic per say?
Do you think that this relationship could work if both of them threw away their family status and decided to date?
The book examines desire in all of its manifestations, including sexual, emotional, and material. Discuss how the characters’ actions are motivated by desire and how it is shown to be both a freeing and destructive force. In what ways does Duras challenge conventional ideas about desire and its satisfaction?
How would your opinion of this novel have changed if her lover had remained white as in a former version of the text? Do you think if her lover was a different race the power dynamic would have come across differently?
Narrator / Author
What did you think about Marguerite and how her lover made her think about life differently?
Do you think if The Narrator was educated on sex and relationships that she would have been less likely to be or get fooled by the relationship with The Narrator?
How do you think the narrator felt about the relationship as she has gotten older?
By titling the book The Lover, what is Duras really trying to convey? (Hint, it’s not about love)
what did you think of this book’s narration? What did you think of the narrator’s perspective on this relationship?
d you guys notice this narration switch and if you did, why do you think Duras did this? Or do you guys find it of little importance?
Why do you think Duras decided to end the novel with the protagonist and wealthy man not ending up together? Did it add a sense of realism?
Did the narrative of the book make sense in explaining the story?
Did you also find the flow of writing confusing? Would you have enjoyed reading this better if it was written in more of a chronological order, or less switching back and forth?
Regarding the title
Where exactly is the love in this book?
Do you think ‘The Lover’ as a title was trying to define the girl or the man? Or does it have a different meaning?
Politics and history
How their relationship stood to represent a time in history before a long devastating war, what anecdotes can we take away from the timeline and how does it fit into the larger story the political landscape that is to come?
Other themes
I picked out this quote (below) because it stood out to me. I wonder how you interpret it? Do you feel it is a straightforward statement or does it have meaning that relates to the theme of the book ? I think that it relates directly to the fact that she is a desired object who realizes this thought too late:
“No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning.”
What overarching messages or commentary do you think Duras is conveying about love, power, and agency through the narrative of “The Lover”? How do these themes resonate with contemporary society and relationships?
