I actually finished The Lover by Marguerite Duras several days ago but stalled in my review and now face a deadline as I pass it on to another Slacker. Although the story conforms to many of Paz' characteristics of a passionate love story, it was not what I am personally looking for this year.
Again, visiting Wiki after completing the novel, I read how this tale tracks closely to the author's experience. Here's the seed that spawns the "pairing" (I cannot call it love): a poor French girl under sixteen who dresses to attract attention, but not necessarily provocatively, meets an older Chinese man on a ferry crossing the Mekong. The begin an affair while she still attends boarding school. His father, a rich banker, strongly opposes the relationship, while her mother, anxious for any financial improvement in her destitute family, encourages it. The man's "flame" moves along Paz spectrum from the red of lust to the blue of love, lasting years, after his marriage and her return to France.
Well, picked up eight books at the library today; odds are one or two will be better.
So, here we have clearly a "love" that violates the social order and is a challenge to the customs of colonial Asia. While Duras writes as though their meeting was predestined, choice to begin and continue provides the necessary tension common to fated passion. However, what is strikingly absent is any yearning towards completion between the lovers. The Chinese man seems to continue the affair as an effort to his father; the girl to cause a scandalous sensation with her peers while pandering to her mother's penury.
Duras' structure and style at times is as superficial and confused as a teenage diarist yet overlaid with an old woman's reminiscences. There are no chapters to organize the story and the long paragraphs are written in multiple streams of consciousness: recalling her brothers, her education, and her desires to create her own fictional topics so she can realize her ultimate goal of being a writer.
Stepping back from the book and ceding its mismatch with this year's theme, the book is an excellent allegory for the colonial Far East. There is no vivid visuals of Saigon, the city could be anywhere on the peninsula, but the depiction of French dependents, the Chinese mercantile class and the appeal to youth to rebel is well drafted.
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