The Lover

I picked up The Lover not really knowing what to expect and finished it in a single afternoon because once I started I just could not put it down. Marguerite Duras tells the story of her own teenage years in colonial Vietnam, when she was fifteen and had an affair with an older Chinese man. The whole thing feels like someone sitting across from you at a kitchen table, remembering things out loud, jumping back and forth in time, repeating certain images because they still hurt. The writing is spare and honest in a way that caught me off guard. Duras does not dress anything up. She writes about desire, shame, family, and poverty with this flat directness that somehow hits harder than pages of flowery description ever could. Her family situation is messy and painful, a mother who is checked out, a brother who is cruel, another brother she loves fiercely, and all of that bleeds into the affair in ways that make the relationship feel both necessary and doomed from the start.

I first read this book in college in a French lit class and it blew me away. That a narrow little book could contain so much— such rich characters, such a unique voice, so much yearning— it stunned me. I never can pinpoint the moment I wanted to be a writer, because I was always writing. But this is maybe the first book I wished I had written.