Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Read 2009
Autobiographical story of growing up in Vietnam. Her parents are teachers. The father dies and the mother stays. They are poor. The mother has a mental illness and doesn't really pay attention to the children. The oldest son steals everything from the family to support his drug habit. The girl, age 15, becomes a lover to a Chinese male.There is no connectivity to anything. She write emotionless and describes sex as something she is observing. Is she actually being sexually abused to support the family and no one does anything to stop it?

I love books that deal with memory, and unreliable narrators, and this hit both buttons. It's a disturbing premise and a bit of a mess of a format and still, it works beautifully as a memoir and recounting of an unusual and passionate love affair. Troubling and intriguing, with beautiful writing.

I rated it 4 stars also, giving it an extra star for the lush writing that reflected the hot and humid climate of Saigon and the erotic affair that was not love or even lust but pure need. I appreciated the way the plot circled around so that you heard multiple times about crossing the Mekong, the layabout brother, the death of the younger brother, the mother's loss of land and then her mind, and yet never quite get to the heart of the main character's desperate need for her Chinese lover. She is 15 and can not really understand but does know that "very early in my life it was too late". Even looking back after a long and not particularly happy life she does not know why she needed him or why he so intensely needed her, "he loved her until death", "mad with desire for her tears, for her anger", but she understood that this love she had at 15 was the moment her whole life was defined by. The author made me believe that our main character's need to write was to capture this memory, this affair, this "music flung across the sea".

3.5 stars. A somewhat rambling poetic tale based on (or accurately depicting?) the author's experiences when she was a teen in Vietnam, while it was still a French colony. She was definitely a skilled writer, and has some great pages, but some bits seemed very unfocused.
Not appropriate for under-15 year olds.
I was interested to read that Duras published another version of this story later, The North China Lover, in a more conventional style. She had originally planned that as a filmscript. It has a higher average rating on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ than The Lover, 3.88, though far fewer ratings.

read Jan. 2024

I think I was hoping for more � more continuity, more exploration of the characters (particularly the older brother of whom we know very little, yet is impacts the story in a big way). The writing is quite good, and evocative of the time and place. Apparently Duras was interested in ‘what was not said� in her later work and this is definitely the case with this novel. 3.5*

Pre-2016 review:

****

This semi-autobiographical novel depicts the relationship between a 15-year old girl living in Indochina and an older, richer Chinese man, written somewhat in the style of Nouveau Roman. The narrative, while mainly linear, is interspersed by some of the features seen in other novels of the genre: sudden time disjunctions, frequent repetitions of various objects (the hat and the shoes) and moments in time, prose at times devoid of emotion. Perhaps it is because I have studied this literary movement some time ago that I was able to better appreciate this novel, because I knew what to expect and how to feel this novel. With Nouveau Roman, you cannot expect the somewhat passive relationship between writer and reader, where all the story is given through the writing; the Nouveau Roman writer wants the reader to create part of the story for himself/herself. By focusing on certain objects or certain descriptions which seem unnecessary, the Nouveau Roman writer wants to create a sense of extreme realism to plunge the reader as much as possible in the context of the action and help generate the emotions felt at the particular moment. And this is what I love about this novel: at times, it makes you really feel like Indochina before the war, the narrative also feels like the Mekong slowly flowing, carrying its various objects picked along the way, like forgotten memories that resurface. I have read and seen other Duras works, and I think this is her most accessible work.