Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The Lover

***AWARDED THE 1984 PRIX GONCOURT***

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre 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.”


The young Marguerite Duras

She has pretty hair, copper hair that spools down her back in waves of alluring movement. People always comment on how beautiful her hair is which she interprets to mean that they don’t find her pretty.

She cuts her hair off.

She wears what is left in pigtails. She buys a man’s hat that is certainly eccentric for a young girl to wear in Saigon in 1929. She wants people to notice her eyes, her lips, certainly something other than her hair. She wants reassurance that her beauty is larger than one exquisite feature.

She is fifteen and a half. Her father is dead. Her mother is poor. Her older brother is a layabout, spoiled by her mother. Her other brother is nice, but no match for the rest of the family. She is lost in a world between adulthood and childhood, a dream world, and a world of harsh realities. Her mother insists that she study mathematics, but she wants to be a writer.

She has a friend at school. A lovely friend totally uninhibited and unaware of how beautiful she is. ”Hélène Logonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much….I am worn out with desire for Hélène Logonelle. I am worn out with desire.”

He has a limousine with a chauffeur. He is rich, or let me be more precise, his father is rich. He is Chinese. He is infatuated with her.

He trembles with fear born desire.

She wants them both. ”I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to giver herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Logonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death.”


Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jane March star in the 1992 French Film.

He is twenty-seven, but it is as if she were older. He is slender, insubstantial, built like a boy. A man trapped in a young mind. Arrested development. ”He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.” He is hindered instead of strengthened by his father. He is obsessed with her, with her nubile body, but knows his father will never let him keep her.

”She wasn’t sure that she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.”

This book is based on the real life of Marguerite Donnadieu better known as Marguerite Duras. She was born in Saigon and did have a wealthy, much older, Chinese lover. At fifteen I think most of us believe we will love many people. We will have many exciting affairs of the heart. True love will be a field of flowers not a single stem already residing in the hand. At fifteen, even when we think we are in love, we can’t know whether it is real. Our basis of comparison is too slender, too new, too wrapped in hormonal need to really know what we feel is love.


I love this picture of Marguerite Duras. The languid, weighted eyelids are a point of fascination.

She wrote this novel at the age of seventy. After fifty-five years I’m sure that Duras’s memories have been filtered through many lenses. The sepia tones of her time with her Chinese lover have deepened. The uncertainty is gone and she is left with clear, concise, brush strokes of a commemoration of lost love. This is a novel and from what I read there are deviations from her nonfiction accounts of her first affair, but this book reads of truth. The reader is left with a precise picture of a young woman who may have lost some of her innocence, but gains a self-confidence to break away from her meaningless life and swim for a new shore.

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