The novelist portrayed as writing The Lover describes herself as "ravaged" by age and, especially, drink. But within a year and a half, the dotty mother will drag what is left of her family back to France, and the girl's first affair will be over. Driven into secrecy, the lovers' game grows more erotic and elaborate. The boy's rich father, "glued to his opium pipe," loathes "the little white whore." To win over the girl's family, the lover invites them to an expensive restaurant, where the oafish brothers gorge themselves without once speaking, even to thank their despised host, and the mother breaks into neurotic laughter when he pays the tab.
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Meanwhile, the girl's mother is hounded by almost uncanny incompetence and bad luck and her two brothers, one brutish, the other sweet but dim, are ne'er-do-wells. Each family - both outsiders among the Vietnamese - views the other with equally lethal racial contempt.
#THE LOVER DURAS SKIN#
From her lover's hairless skin Duras recalls inhaling the scent of English cigarettes, perfume, honey. The two lovers weep in each others' arms. Beneath those Casablanca fans, the sex is clean and smooth- skinned and for-the-first-time. There is whiskey and black silk robes and white suits. The lovers' moans cover the clatter of rickshaws and clogs, the shouting from the streets and bazaars. Not only do we have the long black limousine, we have the teeming native quarters, sunlight seeping through slatted shutters, along with the odors of meat roasting on coal braziers, of jasmine and incense. Were The Lover an English novel, we would invoke Somerset Maugham or, mutatis mutandis, The Jewel in the Crown. Duras' images may come from real life, but they are also classic. The chauffeur drives them to the Chinese quarter of Saigon, where in his own apartment they become lovers, first tentative, then eager, then insatiable. A 27-year-old Chinese rich-boy, who watches her aching with an outsider's love.Ĭhinese rich-boy approaches Caucasion poor-girl. She is a little belle on the verge of everything, and she is being watched there at the ferry dock from inside the depths of a long black limousine.
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She cannot be separated from her gold lam,e shoes - just the thing for her trudge to school. She wears a silk dress (from the bargain basement), tied with one of her brother's leather belts. An irresistible child of 15 steps off the Mekong ferry in Saigon, a slender, wispy poor-kid, who has cooked up her schoolgirl high style from scraps and pieces. Our coquettish little heroine is a vision most lovingly recalled from that past. She is now 71 years old, and the intensely autobiographical tone of this novel has convinced many readers that Duras is herself both the "ravaged" writer portrayed as relating it, and the nymphet of 50 years ago who is at the center of its love story.
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Duras, who is best known in America for her script of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, has for many decades been a leading figure in the vanguard of French fiction and film. MARGUERITE DURAS' The Lover - a best seller last summer in Europe, and her biggest success ever - is an old fashioned colonialist romance, with a difference.