Endless love
MARGUERITE Duras' The Lover is probably best known to most people through the film adaptation starring Jane March and Tony Leung. First published in 1986, it revolves around the intense but doomed affair between a 15-year-old white French girl and an older Chinese man in 1930s French Indochina.
Duras says in the preface to The North China Lover that in the first novel she didn't give the star-crossed couple 'enough time'. This second work attempts to look at the affair in greater depth. She does not hide the fact the story is autobiographical.
In both books, the style is the same. Duras' distinctive prose is spare and her time frame disjointed. This could be confusing but she writes with care and sad lives from a lost era are put together like a montage.
All the characters from The Lover return, but true to her promise, they are more rounded. The lovers are never named. He is 'the Chinese' from Manchuria, heir to a substantial fortune. She, 'the child', is the impoverished daughter of teachers. Her father is dead and her mother has been financially ruined after being cheated in a business transaction. What savings remain have been squandered by a dissolute son to feed his opium addiction.
In Saigon in the 1930s, an affair between a Chinese man and a French girl can only end in tragedy. He must marry a Manchurian girl with a fortune to match his own.
What Duras describes with pathos is the hopelessness the lovers feel as the stifling conventions of society, like the heat of the long summer, close in on their tiny apartment in the Chinese part of the city.
The North China Lover is more complete than The Lover as Duras strips away the veneer of respectability to describe a brutal colonial society riddled with racial intolerance.
The North China Lover by Marguerite Duras Flamingo $60
