leynes's Reviews > L'Amant

Despite its title, The Lover is not a love story. Like Nabokov's Lolita, older men take advantage of underage girls, pretending as though these "sexual arrangements" (i.e. rape in Lolita and statutory rape in The Lover) are born out of pure affection and mutual respect.

But whereas Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's confessional protagonist, who tries to win over his audience from his jail cell, painting himself as the image of a "hopeless romantic" with an incurable illness, Marguerite Duras chooses to tell the narrative from the point of view of the young protagonist, a 15-year-old girl with a dysfunctional family and lower-class background.

In Lolita, the voice of Dolores Haze is effectively strangled by Humbert's narration. We don't get to hear her side of the story. We don't even get to know her as a real person. Lolita is the name that Humbert bestows upon her, it is a manifestation of Humbert's fantasy in which Dolores becomes the sole object of his desire, she is no longer a subject. Dolores becomes Lolita, the "nymph", whose sole purpose it is to satisfy Humbert's twisted fantasy of her. Who this 12-year-old girl really is? The readers will never know.

And whilst Duras refuses to giver her 15-year-old protagonist a name, we nonetheless get her side of the story, and only hers. We learn of her dysfunctional family, of her 27-year-old "lover", the son of prominent Chinese businessman. The "lover" mimics Humbert’s obsessive attachment to his nameless paramour. However, Duras strips their relationship of any romantic pretense, a means that is achieved by having the narrative be told in retrospect, the language the older protagonist uses when looking back on her youth is stripped from false romance and is often tainted with regret.

The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

Throughout the narrative, which refuses to acknowledge traditional chronology and instead goes back and forth between the protagonist's present as a famous French writer and her childhood and youth in French Indochina, we catch glimpses at the young girl's harsh realities. The sudden death of her father impacted her family not only emotionally but financially, as they had to survive without him in Indochina. Consequently, the girl's mother – "she was desperate with despair" – owes numerous debts and often loses herself in the blackout despair of her manic depression. The girl also lives in constant fear of her brothers. Her older brother is violent, aggressive, selfish and vagrant and terrorises the whole family; her younger brother is his prime victim, a fact that distresses the girl greatly: "I tell him my elder brother's cold, insulting violence is there whatever happens to us, whatever comes our way. His first impulse is always to kill, to wipe out, to hold sway over life, to scorn, to hunt, to make suffer."

It is out of this complicated and harrowing family situation that the girl seeks and stays in the unconventional relationship to her rich and older "lover". Out of financial necessity and fear, she seeks stability through him. But when her "lover" takes her family out to dinner at fancy restaurants, it's nothing more but a painful and shame-inducing transaction. Her family will barely speak, let alone look at her lover, resenting the fact that they have to depend on a Chinese man for food, but not proud enough to refuse. The narrator reflects: "When it concerns my lover I’m powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expressions of someone who stares into space."

Critics have often labeled The Lover as an erotic novel, but to me, the erotic or romantic "relationship" serves only as the backdrop to a larger, overarching theme: the loss of childhood for the disillusion of rushed adulthood. The girl is constantly on the defense with her unpredictable mother, who has no faith in her. The girl confesses to her lover, "Today I tell him it's a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life." Dolores and Charlotte, the bickering mother and daughter in Lolita, share a similarly broken relationship. However, Nabokov denies Dolores the chance to ever grow up. Dolores death in childbirth at age seventeen, always defined by the possession of a man.

Duras discards the male gaze in her narrative. Her unnamed protagonist gets to grow up. She is not victimized or infantilized. It's no surprise that the girl hopes to be a writer when she grows up. o write is to make sense of the world, to carve a place for oneself, to affirm the importance and relevance of one's existence. Unlike Dolores Haze, this nameless girl gets the opportunity to fight for autonomy. There's still an obvious power imbalance between the girl and her lover, but she is less a tricked hostage, whisked away for an endless road trip that would be every girl's worst nightmare. Romantic love is not the end goal, even though the girl seeks relief from her isolation and loneliness in her "relationship", her end goal is emancipation through the pursuit of physical connection.

In the introduction of the English translation, Maxine Hong Kingston writes: "The girl and her mother and brothers are barbarians, sans culture. How to enroot oneself but to make primitive, sexual connection with another?" Tired of being rootless, the girl finds a temporary home in a stranger who is just as lost, barely afloat.

Even though the events Duras describes revolve around highly sensitive topics (such as emotional and physical abuse, racism in the French colonies, and issues of consent in relationships involving teenagers and adults), she is not afraid to be honest with her readers. There is no romanticizing of her colonial childhood nor of the trauma that she carried until her death. Nonetheless, The Lover is highly poetic and Duras a lyrical writer. Through her words, she manages to transport her readers to a world that no longer exists, a world of Indochinese landscapes and people she saw abound. If you let it, The Lover will take a hold of you, and it won't let go.