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FICTION/Duras, Marguerite
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Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor FICTION/Duras, Marguerite Due Apr 1, 2024
Published
New York : Pantheon Books c1985.
Language
English
French
Main Author
Marguerite Duras (-)
Item Description
Translation of: L'amant.
Physical Description
117 p.
ISBN
9780375700521
9780060975210
9780394545882
Contents unavailable.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

From the perspective of old age, the ""I"" narrator of this eerie and compact autobiographical novel--which won the 1985 Prix Goncourt in France and has sold 700,000 copies there--relives her troubled adolescence by means of weighted images: frozen memories of her impoverished, harried mother, a schoolmistress in pre-World War II French Indochina, where the narrator grew up; of the narrator's two brothers, the older one corrupt and menacing, the younger mute and gentle but meant to die at a young age; and of herself at 15, especially aboard a ferry crossing the Mekong River into Saigon, dressed in thin silk, an old felt hat and golden sandals. She uses these clothes to seduce a wealthy Chinese merchant (scorned by the French colonists) and to free herself, for a time, from the emotional demands of a sordid family life. (The Chinese lover is the first of hundreds--or it is implied that he is--who will never fully succeed in distracting her from her feelings of shame.) The connections that Duras is trying for remain hazy. And yet the characters--who have no dramatic roles to play here--emerge as dark symbols that have a psychological immediacy for the narrator that can here and there be shared. Again and again, the novel returns to the seduction, and to sex, and has a moody power that Duras fans will welcome and applaud. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."   I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.   Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larges, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I've kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste, I have a face laid waste.   ***   So, I'm fifteen and a half.   It's on a ferry crossing the Mekong River.   The images lasts all the way across.   I'm fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we're in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.   ***   I'm at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school. My mother is a teacher and wants her girl to have a secondary education. "You have to go to high school." What was enough for her is not enough for her daughter. High school and then a good degree in mathematics. That was what had been dinned into me ever since I started school. It never crossed my mind I might escape the mathematics degree, I was glad to give her that hope. Every day I saw her planning her own and her children's future. There came a time when she couldn't plan anything very grand for her sons any more, so she planned other futures, makeshift ones, but they too served their purpose, they blocked in the time that lay ahead. I remember my younger brother's courses in bookkeeping. From the Universal Correspondence School--every year, every level. You have to catch up, my mother used to say. It would last for three days, never four. Never. We'd drop the Universal School whenever my mother was posted to another place. And begin again in the next. My mother kept it up for ten years. It wasn't any good. My younger brother became an accountant's clerk in Saigon. There was no technical school in the colonies; we owed my elder brother's departure for France to that. He stayed in France for several years to study at the technical school. But he didn't keep it up. My mother must have known. But she had no choice, he had to be got away from the other two children. For several years he was no longer part of the family. It was while he was away that my mother bought the land. A terrible business, but for us, the children who were left, not so terrible as the presence of the killer would have been, the child-killer of the night, of the night of the hunter. Excerpted from The Lover by Marguerite Duras All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.