The Lover by Marguerite Duras - short, semi-autobiographical novel by Saigon-born French writer

by Marguerite Duras

Les Editions de Minuit

Set against the backdrop of French-administered Vietnam in the first half of the 20th century, The Lover ( L'Amant, in its original French) is a semi-autobiographical novel of less than 100 pages. It has been praised for its sparse, detached and yet impressionistic prose style. Its more rabid detractors, however, claim the book excuses, even glorifies, statutory rape.

The Lover's author, Marguerite Duras, was born in Saigon in 1914 and spent an unsettled childhood there. Many decades later she would reveal that, while residing with her mother and two brothers in Sa Dec, a ramshackle rural settlement on the Mekong River, she embarked on a torrid affair with the son of a wealthy Chinese businessman: he was 27, and she was just 15. Duras' account of her romantic intrigue, which is presented as a series of narrator reminiscences and flashbacks, never mentions the two protagonists by name.

The tale begins in 1929, and the family of "the young girl", as she is referred to in The Lover, barely survives in genteel poverty. Her mother is a depressed widow who favours the girl's good-for-nothing older brother. The girl is growing up fast, and already aware of her budding feminine charms. With no parental role models to rein her in, she is exerting her independence, dressing idiosyncratically in a man's fedora and gold lame shoes, and even discussing, with a wide-eyed school pal, the potential advantages of becoming a lady of the night.