There is Marie-Claude Carpenter, Betty Fernandez. There is Hélène Lagonelle, a peer at the boarding school. “Our first confidants, though the word seems excessive, are our lovers, the people we meet away from our various homes, first in the streets of Saigon and then on ocean liners and trains, and then all over the place.”Īnd returning to the theme of the mother, other women populate the narrative in beautiful ways. And yet is so delicious, so necessary and addictive: No matter how sticky or uncomfortable the child’s home and family relationships may be, it is never easy to extricate one’s self, to turn to someone outside the home. The love affair with the Chinese man ultimately is about leaving her mother, her home. Duras’ narrator details her tormented relationship with her mother, as well as her brothers. But really, both end up being more about the mother.
This book reminds me of Cheryl Strayed’s essay, “ The Love of My Life,” because both appear, on the surface, to be about one thing: a romantic, sexual partnership. That she’s not the marrying kind, she’ll run away from any marriage, he must give her up, forget her…” To a lesser degree he begins to understand that the journey which will separate him from her is a piece of good luck for their affair. “The man from Cholon knows his father’s decision and the girl’s are the same, and both are irrevocable. “Īnd I connected with the narrator-as-writer, who keeps jumping from first to third person, trying to gain distance, to hide from rules and control, even in her writing:
And that he can never move fast enough to catch her. Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. I connected with the narrator’s stubborn, naïve independence: So much of it felt like my own experiences-but that is often the point in great writing. He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep.”ĭuras writes with such tenderness and intimacy, and, as a result, this book feels incredibly private. I tell him one day I’ll leave my mother, one day even for my mother I’ll have no love left. But that day in that room, tears console both for the past and for the future. Which is probably why I loved the narrator, the teenaged girl, Marguerite Duras herself(?) so much: I don’t know if I cried when I saw the film. I’ve seen the film but the book was better. I don’t know why I didn’t trust these recommendations more. For years, I’ve been told to read Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, that I would adore it.