The lover - Duras, Marguerite
Summary: In prewar Indochina during the last days of colonialism, a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl initiates herself into a world of passion and lust, of abandon and undying love, through her love affair with a Chinese man - (Baker & Taylor)
Review
It is said old loves can haunt us. The Lover creates this feeling through an atmosphere of shadows, veils, floating memories that came from - was it this boat trip or the last one? from age eight or twelve or thirty? In the end it doesn't matter, for the experience is now embedded, a distinct yet inseparable part of the personality. Marguerite Duras mines her own past to tell The Lover, the story of an adolescent girl growing up in Indochina during the 1930s. The girl is wayward, rebellious; one day, returning to school on the ferry, dressed in gold lame shoes, a man's hat and a silk dress, she encounters the son of a Chinese millionaire. Soon they are involved in the first affair of her life, one she claims has no basis in love for her. He can never marry her - his father has refused - and she says she will leave without regrets. But is that possible? Years later she looks back. By presenting ideas and memories in paragraphs that are literally isolated yet constantly overlapping, The Lover creates a misty world of connections made by emotion rather than logic or chronology, a feeling that lingers after the book itself is closed. - From 500 Great books for women, review by Erica Bauermeister
