Reading Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is a genuinely disorienting experience. It’s essentially an autobiographical novel about a fifteen(ish?) year-old French girl who begins a passionate affair with a wealthy, older Chinese man. A detail I found interesting about the novel is how it actively deprives us of the lover’s identity. For example, we know he […]
Once again, this was a book that did not play out as I expected (ᵕ • ᴗ •) It was a bit difficult at first to make sense of what was happening and where each scene fit into a larger timeline, but by the end, I quite liked that! The non-linear storytelling made it feel […]
The non-linear storytelling was honestly confusing. I know it’s supposed to mimic the narrator’s train of thought but… since I’m not her, I didn’t really know where all this information was coming from! I felt like that “guy who needs context” meme for the beginning portion. There were details all over the place and one […]
To be honest, when I finished The Lover, my first reaction was something like… what exactly did I just read? Not in a bad way, but in the sense that the novel feels strange and difficult to pin down. The story doesn’t unfold in a clean, chronological way, and the characters themselves are hard to […]
This read had me quite puzzled at times, it seems we cannot get a simple love story in our class. Starting off being 15 and a half, Duras is a baby, she’s vulnerable to the world around her. As she’s on the ferry, she notices the limousine and it’s occupant, the man. After his proposition …
This book by Duras was like a haphazard letter written to someone about moments of their life, except they forgot to go in chronological order. It was so good in some parts but rage baited me to the core in the other parts (almost 80% of the parts that included the narrator’s mother). I wanted […]
Posted in Blogs, Duras | Tagged with age gap, contrast in narrative, family issues, social class, The Lover, vulnerability
Alright so after this read I feel as though a common trend in the books we are reading is that men are being consistently displayed as awful. We have encountered horrible husbands like Quimet in The Time of the Doves and Antonio in The S…
Posted in Blogs, Duras | Tagged with Naivety, Predatory, The Lover
Alright so after this read I feel as though a common trend in the books we are reading is that men are being consistently displayed as awful. We have encountered horrible husbands like Quimet in The Time of the Doves and Antonio in The S…
Posted in Blogs, Duras | Tagged with Naivety, Predatory, The Lover
Why is this book called the lover??? I mean I get ‘why’ but I definitely don’t like why. Every instance this man had with protagonist was just uncomfortable to the highest degree. Even if I tried to situate myself with context or go with the flow of the story, I wasn’t at ease reading any […]
Posted in Blogs, Duras | Tagged with class, money, relationships, reminiscing, RMST 202
Duras’ The Lover follows a fifteen-year-old French girl in colonial Indochina and the wealthy, much older Chinese man who becomes her lover. Some may try to frame this as sensual, tragic, even romantic… but I can assure you that it lands somewhere closer to the unnerving territory occupied by Lolita. I think what I found […]
Posted in Blogs, Duras | Tagged with book-reviews
