Gabrielle's Reviews > L'Amant
L'Amant
by
by
Gabrielle's review
bookshelves: french, own-a-copy, read-in-2018, reviewed, ouch-my-feels
Jun 05, 2018
bookshelves: french, own-a-copy, read-in-2018, reviewed, ouch-my-feels
Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I picked this up. Sepia tinted nostalgia. Eroticism. Regrets. Sadness. I knew that it was a vaguely fictionized version of an episode of Duras’ adolescence, when she fell in love and began a sexual relation with an older Chinese businessman when she lived in French Indochina. I knew that it explored her fractured relationship with her mother and her nameless lover’s tensions with his own father. I had heard that it captured that strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, when the very act of breathing feels uncomfortable and ill-fitting, like weirdly cut clothes. I thought, sure, that sounds like a book I’d like. I picked up a copy, read over a rainy Monday and put it on my shelf feeling like I had been hit over the head.
The prose is fluid and dreamlike, probably because it’s the voice of an old woman looking back at her far away past: the details are vague, some faces are blurred and it can sometimes feel like Duras narrates her tale from a place of aloofness, but I feel like it’s simply the distance of years. When I look back at things that happened when I was fifteen, it almost feels like it happened to someone else – and I’m nowhere near seventy years old yet. The writing is also saturated with suffering, and it leaves a trace of pain like an oil slick over the whole story. Duras never complains about her circumstances, she simply wants to say “This happened. It damaged me. I kept living anyway.” And yet it is impossible not empathize with her loneliness, her resentment, her feelings of abandonment and her need to feel like someone wants and values her.
Obviously, everything about this coupling is forbidden: the lovers’ age, race and class differences mean their relationship will never be anything but doomed, but they need each other to escape their respective misery, feeling that the only peace and understanding they will ever find is with the other.
Many people have compared it to “Lolita” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), because it’s a disturbing story about an older man and a young “girl”, beautifully written. It is unsettling, but I didn’t feel like it was the relationship between the girl and the business man that was wrong: it was the abuse they both suffered. When you are damaged, sometimes you find comfort in the strangest places, and I doesn’t feel like it’s my place to judge them. "Lolita" was horrifying because Humbert made Lo suffer; "The Lover" is moving because they are united by their pain.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I picked this up. Sepia tinted nostalgia. Eroticism. Regrets. Sadness. I knew that it was a vaguely fictionized version of an episode of Duras’ adolescence, when she fell in love and began a sexual relation with an older Chinese businessman when she lived in French Indochina. I knew that it explored her fractured relationship with her mother and her nameless lover’s tensions with his own father. I had heard that it captured that strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, when the very act of breathing feels uncomfortable and ill-fitting, like weirdly cut clothes. I thought, sure, that sounds like a book I’d like. I picked up a copy, read over a rainy Monday and put it on my shelf feeling like I had been hit over the head.
The prose is fluid and dreamlike, probably because it’s the voice of an old woman looking back at her far away past: the details are vague, some faces are blurred and it can sometimes feel like Duras narrates her tale from a place of aloofness, but I feel like it’s simply the distance of years. When I look back at things that happened when I was fifteen, it almost feels like it happened to someone else – and I’m nowhere near seventy years old yet. The writing is also saturated with suffering, and it leaves a trace of pain like an oil slick over the whole story. Duras never complains about her circumstances, she simply wants to say “This happened. It damaged me. I kept living anyway.” And yet it is impossible not empathize with her loneliness, her resentment, her feelings of abandonment and her need to feel like someone wants and values her.
Obviously, everything about this coupling is forbidden: the lovers’ age, race and class differences mean their relationship will never be anything but doomed, but they need each other to escape their respective misery, feeling that the only peace and understanding they will ever find is with the other.
Many people have compared it to “Lolita” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), because it’s a disturbing story about an older man and a young “girl”, beautifully written. It is unsettling, but I didn’t feel like it was the relationship between the girl and the business man that was wrong: it was the abuse they both suffered. When you are damaged, sometimes you find comfort in the strangest places, and I doesn’t feel like it’s my place to judge them. "Lolita" was horrifying because Humbert made Lo suffer; "The Lover" is moving because they are united by their pain.
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Reading Progress
February 5, 2017
– Shelved as:
to-read
February 5, 2017
– Shelved
February 5, 2017
– Shelved as:
french
June 3, 2018
– Shelved as:
own-a-copy
June 4, 2018
–
Started Reading
June 4, 2018
– Shelved as:
read-in-2018
June 5, 2018
– Shelved as:
reviewed
June 5, 2018
– Shelved as:
ouch-my-feels
June 5, 2018
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-16 of 16 (16 new)
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I recently picked up a copy of this, but I've always been reluctant to read it, for the same reason that I struggle with Lolita. I will read it, ultimately, for the writing. Your review ..."
Julie, I won't lie: it's not a super pleasant read because a lot of the stuff talked about is very painful. But the affair is not the most shocking aspect as far as I am concerned.
The parts about her mother and older brother were definitely the hardest for me. I felt that it was more resentment than hatred, but honestly, I can't blame her.
Oh yes, definitely.
Ha ha ha. I've seen the movie version of this many moons ago, may try to track down the novel. Thanks for the recommendation.
Let me know how you like it!
Hi Gabrielle, my review is in but I simply liked it rather than loved it. I'm glad I read it but I remember my teenage years as a time of passion and raging hormones so this p her character was alien to me. Still glad you recommended it and we do need to learn by hearing other prints of view. Maybe that is what you were aiming for in your recommendation. Interesting...
Hi Gabrielle, my review is in but I simply liked it rather than loved it. I'm glad I read it but I remember my teenage years as a time of passion and raging hormones so this p her character was alien to me. Still glad you recommended it and we do need to learn by hearing other prints of view. Maybe that is what you were aiming for in your recommendation. Interesting...
Glad you liked it!
Thank you April!
Like you, I thought of Lolita, but I didn't crystalise the comparison as well as you do in your closing sentence. (My angle was more shock that the mother and older brothers were complicit - in a way that Lolita's mother perhaps was not.)
Thank you Cecily! That's true, her mother and brother do seem complicit in what they surely knew was a wrong situation - this had not clicked for me until I read your review. I felt more disgusted by the way her family treats her than by her illicit affair, to be honest.
I recently picked up a copy of this, but I've always been reluctant to read it, for the same reason that I struggle with Lolita. I will read it, ultimately, for the writing. Your review helps the cause.