The Lover

In the category "Books that you have to read one day", The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. But first, a little summary.

Summary

The novel is an autofiction, that is to say that the author claims to tell her life story without claiming to be completely true. One can therefore assume that the story is largely drawn from her own experiences, but one must keep in mind that some details may very well be fictional.

The author tells about her childhood in China, and particularly about an episode that marked her: her affair, at 15, with a man 12 years older. A relationship that could hardly be described as healthy, which is largely qualified as "love" (but this is a point I'd like to talk about later), very carnal, and conflictual. Indeed, neither the narrator's family, which is dysfunctional to begin with, nor the lover's family approve of this relationship. She is white, he is Chinese. This romance is doomed to failure, which saddens the lovers who nevertheless accept this inevitability.

The author's family is a source of great darkness. The older brother, simply put, is dangerous, and the narrator has a deep desire to kill him. The younger brother never speaks and is constantly bullied by his older brother. The mother loves her children as best she can but is unable to provide a healthy environment for them. No one talks to each other, emotions are suppressed. This family environment certainly affects the narrator's relationship with her lover.

The Lover

Let's talk a little about this so-called love relationship. Much of the novel's success certainly comes from it, a relationship described as passionate, initiatory, conflicting and exposing the partners to their own vulnerability. Age is an aspect that exacerbates this passion: the child (for she is 15), a virgin, is visibly fascinated by the expert hands of this adult man. She says she "likes the idea that he has many women, that of being among these women confused". She has child's breasts: when he eats them, "he becomes brutal, his feeling is desperate". When they make love for the first time, he cries. (How disturbing, making love to a child.) While we thought we were witnessing a kind of kidnapping when he takes her to an unknown place in his limousine, we almost believe we are witnessing a reversal of the situation when it is he who is tortured with pain, and she, detached, who takes his pleasure.

Their relationship, based mainly on nights of torrid sex, ends when the narrator has to return to France. The lover gets married by his father to a rich woman. Several years later, he calls her, and tells her that he still loves her. This is how the novel ends.

So now what? What do I, as a reader, take away from this story? I feel that there are important topics that could have been covered here, and that the author missed her chance. By describing her relationship with a much older man when she was just entering her teens as a passionate experience that introduced her to her sexuality and made her grow as a woman, she left the whole issue of love and age difference out of the story, under the guise of ethereal, enigmatic, and melancholy writing.

Love

In this novel, and in many other literary and cinematographic works, love is described as a feeling that falls upon us. We can't do anything against it, it is uncontrollable, and if it is powerful enough, if it is a "true" love, we shouldn't be able to get over it. So, according to this logic, one should face all odds to unite with the one of one's heart, and to hell with conventions. It is this type of thinking that leads many people to pursue toxic relationships in the name of "love". I also believe that it is in the name of this "love" that over-aged men believe they are entitled to put their good judgment aside to seduce under-aged girls, and it is by wielding this twisted concept that they manage to gain the approval of much of society. This is a dangerous view.

Love is not some kind of mystical bubble that encompasses two people and merges them together. It is not an inevitability. Like any other feeling, love is created by thoughts, and these thoughts can be chosen.

Love is a choice. If we have feelings of love for someone, it is because we have a series of thoughts about them that create love in us. If the only thoughts we have for the other person are ones of hope and illusion and we have a deep desire to screw ourselves in the other person, that is not love. It is simply called sexual desire.

When the girl is 15 years old and has been told all her life that this is love, it is normal that she believes in it. But a 27 year old adult has normally accumulated some life experience. They should be able to put their desire aside and ask themselves if sleeping with a child is really in everyone's best interest.

And when the older man cries while making love, when this love is described as "abominable" and "desperate", when the girl says that she followed the man because "she had to, it was like an obligation", it is probably because the adult did not take responsibility, and that is not love.

I am not saying that the author's experience is not valid and should be thrown out. It is a rich experience and worth telling. But precisely, with 50 years of hindsight (Marguerite Duras wrote The Lover at 70 years old), I would have found it much more relevant if she had shared her experience in a way that her readers could have learned something from it. I feel that what she did instead was leave them with a vague sense of melancholy and the naive impression that love must be passionate, that the more tortuous and difficult the path, the deeper the experience, and above all, that love has no age. Even when it comes to a child.

I must add in conclusion that although the love relationship is a central theme of the book, it is not the only one, but it is the one that took all the place for me. I could also have talked about the historical and family context, which are also very important, and for that I would need to reread and analyze it further. Which, to tell the truth, I don't intend to do.