Marguerite Duras’1 novel The Lover turns 40 this year… wow, a real deal time peg, I’ve only dreamed of having one of these. What does The Lover mean now that it’s 40? How does it speak across time?? What does it say about How We Live Now?? Are we reading The Lover in the era of post-#metoo feminist retrenchment? Is it the preeminent text of intersectionality? Does every autofictional novel that comes out now just wish it was The Lover? If the prudes currently trying to ruin our culture could read, would they hate The Lover? Can we get it cancelled for the age gap, folks? Can we Lolita it, and make every conversation about it insufferable??
The good news is that at 39, 41, or at any other aesthetically displeasing non-round number, The Lover is a great novel, one that should be firmly ensconced in whatever remains of the canon, and needs no new angle. It’s one of those novels that feels sculpted, every line precisely worked over, lapidary. Beyond its lurid narrative hook – and god, look at that English cover, going all out with EXOTIC and EROTIC and CONFESSION – there is a frankly otherworldly quality to the novel’s prose, which lives in the murky indeterminate space between memory and desire and regret. Duras’s nameless narrator, who might be Duras herself, but who really cares – seriously – who cares??? All that matters by the end is that the narrator has become someone able to tell the story, a writer – wrenches herself out of the definite early on in the novel, whether by switching indeterminately between first and third person or by stating simply that
The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.
This spectral quality hangs over the book, which is putatively about the relationship between the 15 year old narrator and her 27 year old lover (that’s the SALACIOUS part), but instead flits backwards and forwards in time and encompasses many kinds of love, and in many different valences: the love between friends and peers, between siblings, between a mother and her children.
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