The Lover

"It seems to me that out of all the books we’re discussing at the moment, the mother in The Lover is the saddest. She seems so unhappy, sour, and abject. She’s living in what used to be called Indochina, in genteel poverty and is very concerned with appearances. There is no celebration of the love that passes between mother and daughter, just a fear of how things might seem to others. So the female protagonist of The Lover has to separate from this sad and harsh mother. This is a wonderful moment: she puts on a fedora hat and gold sandals and, in so doing, separates from her mother and becomes someone else. She is trying things out, she goes on a ferry and that’s when she first catches the eye of the Chinese banker. There is an insinuation that the banker gives her money, and that this young woman then gives the money to her mother. The two things to say about this in terms of mothers in literature is that she is a sad, impoverished, genteel mother living at a time when the father isn’t there – so this must have been quite transgressive – and she is just trying to keep things going, but not doing very well. I guess Duras’ attention is not on the mother there, it is on how the daughter separates from the mother, that incandescent moment when she is wearing those gold sandals and fedora hat, and standing on a ferry, sailing away to make something else of herself."

"Exactly. So, I started with The Lover by Marguerite Duras, because it’s a narrative of life in French colonial Vietnam. It’s the story of a French Catholic schoolgirl whose family has fallen on hard times and of her consensual but scandalous love affair with a rich Chinese Vietnamese. He was 25 and she was only 15 at the time. At the beginning she is attracted by his wealth, but she realizes, in the end, that he was her first love. It was a real reversal of the white expat male with a Vietnamese girl that you see in Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American . It broke those stereotypes. It’s radical and it’s an adventure. It just appealed to me when I first read it. It became a bestseller and a million copies were sold. Yes it is autobiographical. She wrote it much, much later, when she was 70 or so. It’s interesting that it took her all that time to decide that this had been the defining moment in her coming-of-age. Years after their affair, the Lover (Huỳnh Thủy Lê) on a trip to Paris with his wife, phoned Duras to tell her that “he still loved her, that he would never stop loving her, that he would love her for the rest of his life.” There’s no exoticism and it’s not descriptive. Duras’s style is terse, intimate. It’s much more about inner feelings. All she needs are two or three words to place you in the situation she’s in. It’s about the interactions in her very dysfunctional family, about rebelling against social mores both because she’s so young and because she’s having an affair with a Vietnamese. The novel shows the underbelly of French colonialism and the inherent racism of the time. I was brought up in the French school system, with exotic pictures of beautiful ladies in French Indochina. This book was, for me, a wake-up call to the realities of French colonialism, which were pretty grim. After her father died, the family lived in relative poverty; her parents were teachers and had gone to Indochina as part of what the French portrayed as their ‘ mission civilisatrice’ , their civilizing mission. In the book, it’s anything but. But the book does not address the crimes of the French colonial regime I discovered later, when I travelled there. That’s another subject, which still hasn’t been covered within French or Vietnamese literature, and which should be."