The love affair is described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner it is all-consuming - the narrator spends all her time with her lover and sneaks home late at night - but it seems emotionless.
She travels to and from school in an odd outfit that marks her as the outsider she feels herself to be. The narrator is isolated she feels loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways, she attends school but has few friends, and she quickly gets a bad reputation because of her sexual experience. The voice is halting and obviously pained but also detached, as though she's trying to make sense of her experience but only can repeat sentences about the meaninglessness of it all. I don't know any more about them since that day. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. She died, for me, of my younger brother's death. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. Here is a sample (from early in the book - I'm not giving anything away): The narrator's voice is simple and spare the sentences seem empty of feeling, although emotion lurks under the surface, unexpressed but present. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel's end she describes the lovers' fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. But the novel doesn't stay focused solely on the affair it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator's later life in France and of what happens to her family members.
It's a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family - her mother and two brothers - and who has an affair with older Chinese man.
#THE LOVER DURAS AUDIOBOOK PLUS#
There she discusses The Lover plus Duras' life and reputation. If you're interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove's post on Duras. It's a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read.
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