Marguerite Duras, The Lover
WRITTEN BY: Matej Vrebac
Duras masterfully, with considerable experience and maturity as a writer, places sensuality, sadism, nostalgia and the human urge for destruction in The Lover , and achieves all this in a style that is not at all pretentiously lavish.
The French writer, screenwriter and director Marguerite Duras already left a significant social impact and artistic legacy during her lifetime, among which the novel written in 1984 in the author's seventies stands out. Her Lover (French: L'Amant ) – immortalized by the Goncourt Prize, nominated for the Nobel Prize and screened by Jean-Jacques Annaud – still today represents a masterpiece of the author's oeuvre, as well as of Francophone literature in general.
In medias res Duras, with this autobiographical narrative, takes us back to the first half of the twentieth century, during the French occupation of Indochina, while one day, at the age of less than sixteen, a girl in a man's felt hat, a silk dress with a belt and golden shoes crosses the Mekong River. A young girl who went to a boarding school in Saigon will not be alone crossing the river, a Chinese man, a descendant of a rich family from northern China, will also be on the scaffolding. She - from an impoverished family, the daughter of a school manager, will embark on an experiment , break a kind of taboo by overcoming the racial and age difference through a relationship with a thirty-year-old Chinese man.
The stunning narrative flow through the change of two narrative perspectives, that of a young girl at the time and that of an adult from a distance, creates an exceptional erotic tension with the text, but it does not dwell only on it, but layers a number of other phenomena and realities. The Lover allows an insight into French colonialism, but also its disintegration, through relationships in a stone family where white supremacy is read in approval of that relationship exclusively working for material well-being. But above all, this short novel masterfully portrays desire and pleasure, or rather the countless layers of pleasure that the girl discovers, unlike the immature mother who seems to have never experienced them. It is precisely the relationship of the protagonist with her mother that is one of the more interesting aspects of this work, which at times with its elaboration even reminds of the work of another excellent French writer of fictionalized memoirs - that is, One Woman by Annie Ernaux, albeit through a totally different sensibility. While One Woman is a sort of requiem and homage to the author's mother and an entire generation of women, the author of Ljubavnik mercilessly dissects the character of the mother, portraying her as almost inferior, although she still retains the impression of a strong and impressive character.
Duras masterfully, with considerable experience and maturity as a writer, places sensuality, sadism, nostalgia and the human urge for destruction in The Lover , and achieves all this in a style that is not at all pretentiously lavish. The writer will touch on the act of writing, confirming her own thesis: I started writing in an environment that encouraged me to be restrained. Writing then was still a matter of ethics. Today, writing often seems to mean nothing. Sometimes I know: that from the moment it does not merge all things into one, when it becomes a vain and empty act, writing means nothing. So as we read the longing packed between these lines, we admire the unscrupulous audacity, destinies and talent that merge in The Lover .
The Lover of Marguerite Duras rightly enjoys the status of an indispensable modern classic, updated through Buybook's edition translated by the already experienced translator Tee Mijan-Bilalagić. This translation is a confirmation that the classics need to be translated anew, because each translation conveys and actualizes the timeless significance of a work of art, such as this novel, into the present. In the end, this intimate narrative bears witness to the spirit of a bygone era as much as it does to universal unanswered human questions. There is no doubt that this book will find its way to many hearts and provide reading pleasure that only a true lover can give.