The Lover

First published in France in 1984, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (L’Amant) is a haunting, semi-autobiographical novel set in French Indochina in the late 1920s. Recounted through the fractured memories of an older narrator, it returns to the adolescence of a poor French girl living with her troubled family near Saigon, and to her affair with a wealthy young Chinese man she encounters while crossing the Mekong River. Desire, money, family resentment and the racial hierarchies of colonial society shape their relationship, while the narrator’s shifting perspective makes memory itself an elusive presence.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1984, The Lover is among Duras’s most celebrated works, distilling the intensity of her fiction into a spare, lyrical prose in which silences can carry as much weight as words. Rather than offering a straightforward account of first love, Duras explores the ways desire becomes entangled with shame, power, class and the stories we construct about our younger selves. The result is an intimate yet unsettling portrait of adolescence and recollection, inseparable from the colonial world in which it unfolds.

From the book

“Very early in my life it was too late.”

— Marguerite Duras, The Lover

On The Lover

“The Lover is a great literary act of looking back.”

— Anthony Macris, The Conversation