I trembled at the final moment of separation, when the brazen girl, now almost a woman, stands on the deck of the ocean liner, returning to France for good and yet separation was predestined in the story, it was even its condition. I was fascinated too, of course, by the madness of the mother who fights in vain against the elements, against the Pacific, by the violence of the elder brother, which can surface at any moment, by the fragility of the younger brother, by death prowling in the vicinity, by the fatality that bears down on each character. There I am, on the ferry with a young girl in the fullness of youth, a young girl with her infernal beauty suddenly restored, while her Indochinese lover awaits his cue, just the other side of the rail, comfortable in his luxury car.Īfterwards, it never stopped, I was transported, as though I were being swept along by the muddy waters of a rushing river, captivated by this story of skin, bodies, sweat, secret embraces, by this fevered love that takes place behind shutters, by the scandal of this love affair because the young girl is so young, because the lover belongs to the colonized people. She stresses that – her wrinkles, her beauty lost to this so visible ageing – she even speaks about a ‘ravaged’ face and then, just after, in a short paragraph, she writes: ‘So, I’m fifteen and a half, on a ferry crossing the Mekong river’, and in one sentence, one single sentence, I find myself catapulted to Indochina at the end of the 1930s. The book even begins with a description of her age: she says she has a face ‘scored with wrinkles’. It was the autumn of 1984, the book had just come out, and people were talking about it a lot, saying that Duras would end up winning the Prix Goncourt. Urn:oclc:851765130 Scandate 20090811165839 Scanner was seventeen years old when I read The Lover for the first time.

OL159538W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 77.94 Pages 140 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:1299039014 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:08:22 Boxid IA101514 Boxid_2 CH120121030-BL1 Camera Canon 5D City New York Donor

The lover by marguerite duras