Steven Godin's Reviews > The Lover

A world away from the intelligence insulting and glorified trash of E. L. James, Marguerite Duras has written a sparse, minimal and painfully sad erotic love story that never gets drawn into the realms of romantic fantasy.
And to deeply appreciate 'The Lover', it needs to be looked at from the perspective of Duras herself. Pen was put to paper when she was 70, it's predominantly all about looking back on memories past, and I say it's a painful read, painful in respects to nostalgia, as nostalgia forms the basis for the story that has origins from her actual youth while living in French Indochina, age fifteen she fell in love with a rich Chinese man. Duras takes this premise and places a white teenage girl in South Vietnam, into the arms of a wealthy older man who catches her eye while been driven in a limousine. But this is a forbidden love that was always doomed, trying to keep secret from her mother and two brothers she would regularly meet with her lover for moments of passionate bliss.

Duras stays away from any attention seeking sexual content, and never covers ground of what's right or wrong, just tells the simple tale of innocence lost. The narrative at times appears broken, and there is little in the way of dialogue, but his only helps to fortify the reading experience of it feeling like a distant dream.
After being Oscar nominated for her screenplay on the Alain Resnais film classic 'Hiroshima mon amour', Duras would rightly win Frances most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and she will always remains a significant French writer.