![]() ![]() It’s largely based on the author’s own life - she was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to French parents who had emigrated there to work in the French colony. The Lover is narrated by Hélène Lagonelle, a French woman looking back on her life in Indochina (now Vietnam) and, in particular, the romance she had with a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 when she was just 15. I read it back to back with another (supposedly) sensual novel, the (rather horrid) Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, and they couldn’t be further apart - in mood, style or sheer literary power - even though they covered similar (sexual) territory. So begins Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, an evocative and sensual novel about a young girl’s affair with a man 12 years her senior, which was first published in 1984. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. He introduced himself and said: “I’ve known you for years. One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. ![]() Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. Fiction – Kindle edition Harper Perennial 130 pages 2006. ![]()
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