He strikes up a conversation with the girl she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine.Ĭompelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. She attracts the attention of a 27-year-old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. In 1929, a 15-year-old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc to her boarding school in Saigon.
Set against the backdrop of French Indochina, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese- Vietnamese man. It was adapted to film in 1992 as The Lover.
It has been translated into 43 languages and was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt.
(Oct.The Lover (French: L'Amant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les Éditions de Minuit. No doubt her lean, haunting prose reads even more beautifully in the original French, but Duras's story is so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that its blend of passion and cynicism lingers like a strong perfume. The febrile sexuality of the young girls at the school, the languid emotionalism of the Chinese lover, the splendid cars, the melancholy American dance music, the open roads across the rice paddies under wide rainy skies, the cinemas and nightclubs, and finally the ocean liner that takes her tragic family back to F'rance-Duras evokes all this with the utmost economy but the most telling atmospheric force.
Beginning as bare notes toward a film script (Duras wrote the script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour), the story quickly takes on its own intense, exotic flavor. The veteran French author, who scored a considerable success with The Lover, here zeroes in much more closely on the passionate affair between her young self, a French teenager at a school in Indo-China in the early 1930s, and the spoiled young son of a Chinese millionaire.
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