{"id":85212,"date":"2015-04-27T18:36:30","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T22:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85212"},"modified":"2015-04-28T13:51:54","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T17:51:54","slug":"on-a-pedestal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/27\/on-a-pedestal\/","title":{"rendered":"On a Pedestal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Duras\u2019s <\/em>The Lover, thirty years later.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"duras\"<\/a>

A young Duras on the cover of The Lover<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Early in Marguerite Duras\u2019s The Lover<\/em>, we encounter an indelible image: a strange rag doll of a girl rides the ferry across the Mekong River en route to Saigon. She\u2019s an adolescent, fifteen and a half, and she looks both too young and too old for her age, in a sleeveless, low-cut, red silk dress, a leather belt that belongs to one of her older brothers, gold lam\u00e9 shoes, and\u2014the most striking piece of her ensemble\u2014a large, flat-brimmed men\u2019s hat:<\/p>\n

\n

Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they\u2019re right for me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That elliptical, dreamlike tone is characteristic of the novel. The book\u2019s narrator is a young woman in flux. She\u2019s outgrown childhood and has poured her body into oversize markers of adulthood; the conclusion of the ferry ride signals the start of her sexual awakening, as she first glimpses the chauffeured black limousine that belongs to the twenty-seven-year-old Chinese businessman, the novel\u2019s eponymous lover.<\/p>\n

The Lover<\/em>, Duras\u2019s forty-eighth work, was published in France in 1984; the English translation arrived in the United States a year later. If the book, at just over a hundred pages, reads like the hazy, disconnected musings of a seventy-year-old writer looking at faded snapshots of her past, that\u2019s because it is. When Duras claimed that the novel was entirely autobiographical, it became something of an international sensation. But, as the New York Times<\/em> noted, \u201ctruth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity\u201d; Duras also went on to say \u201cthat the story of her life did not exist<\/a>.\u201d She and the novel found even more notoriety a decade later, when Jean-Jacques Annaud\u2019s film adaptation was released. Duras eventually washed her hands of the film, which focused mainly on the erotic elements of the story\u2014and indeed the novel\u2019s depictions of sex receive an outsize portion of attention. But it\u2019s also a study in the narrator\u2019s fraught connection with her family and the cultural fissures in French-colonial Indochine. <\/p>\n

Now, three decades after its initial publication, the book has inspired countless writers while generating plenty of criticism. On April 14, Thalia Book Club<\/a> at New York\u2019s Symphony Space held a retrospective commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the book\u2019s English-language publication. The event featured four writers\u2014Catherine Lacey, Akhil Sharma, Kate Zambreno, and The <\/em>New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s art editor Fran\u00e7oise Mouly\u2014who touched on the novel\u2019s continued influence.<\/p>\n

The Lover <\/em>shifts between a passive, almost mechanical voice and a first-person narration that\u2019s more akin to the whispers of a close confidante. \u201cIt feels like actually being in a room with someone after three glasses of wine,\u201d Mouly remarked of the style, \u201cand she\u2019s talking to you in a way that is so vivid that is seldom achieved.\u201d The comment garnered knowing laughs\u2014Duras, who died in 1996, famously struggled with alcoholism\u2014but for Mouly the book is a confident, confessional work from an author at the height of her craft.<\/p>\n

What she reads as a sophisticated balance between tones, though, Sharma interpreted as disjointed ramblings. \u201cFor me, writers rarely remain on a pedestal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to retain respect, and so the issue, for a writer, is not stepping off the pedestal, but desperately trying to remain on the pedestal. It\u2019s so hard to remain competent. For me that\u2019s a lot of it. I think a lot of these things that are dismissed are hard to do. They are worth doing as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Sharma\u2014whose own novel, Family Life<\/em>, also melds fiction with autobiography\u2014much of the frustration in reading The Lover <\/em>stems from the fact that so much of the book seems contingent on a reader\u2019s knowledge of Duras\u2019s own personal history. Sharma said the book should be able to effectively succeed or fail independent of an awareness of the author\u2019s biography. His introduction to The Lover <\/em>came by way of the 1992 film, which,\u00a0in a phone interview, he called \u201ccheesy.\u201d When, years later, he finally encountered the actual novel, he couldn\u2019t get past the fact that it just wasn\u2019t \u201ca good book.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe language seems ornamental, and not especially a good ornament. It\u2019s not actually very pretty, and it\u2019s just making general claims that don\u2019t appear to be true,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That dreamy vagueness, and the odd jumps in time and setting that so frustrated Sharma, is what makes the book particularly appealing to Lacey. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge distance between the narrative voice and the bulk of the experiences that she\u2019s talking about,\u201d Lacey said in a phone interview. \u201cBut the voice is beautiful. It bounces among these things and it\u2019s interesting that she doesn\u2019t even get into the love affair until a third of the way into a hundred-page book. It\u2019s billed as a love story, but it\u2019s really more about a woman coming to terms with the idea of love in a vacuum, of a woman coming to terms with her own potency and power and contradictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does she feel that a reader needs an understanding of Duras\u2019s life to appreciate the book\u2019s plot?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t really need that history to understand what is happening with race and class and culture in this book,\u201d Lacey suggested. \u201cI actually don\u2019t research that much when reading a book like this. It\u2019s important to appreciate the book on its own.\u201d She focused on the power dynamics at the core of the novel. \u201cThe book is much more about power than love. Love is an exchange of power. Look, The Power Exchanger <\/em>wouldn\u2019t be as great a title, but the book is a chess game. It\u2019s about what happens during these moments of exchanges of power, between the lovers, between cultures, between family,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Still, Sharma believes that The Lover <\/em>is a book whose praise seems to radiate more from reader interest in the author\u2019s own larger-than-life mythology. \u201cI don\u2019t know who reads it, honestly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Duras herself was surprised by the breathless praise The Lover <\/em>received; she dismissed the book, even going so far as to rewrite it, in the form of notes to a film, as The North China Lover<\/em>. And Laure Adler, in her unauthorized biography Marguerite Duras: A Life<\/em>, writes that the author had harsh words for it, international acclaim or no.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Love<\/em>r is a load of shit,\u201d she told Annaud when the two were collaborating on the film adaptation. \u201cIt\u2019s an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brian Mastroianni<\/a> is a journalist based in New York. His work has been featured by <\/em>The Atlantic, Fox News, Yahoo News, CBS News, and <\/em>Brown Medicine Magazine, among others. Follow him on Twitter @brimastroianni<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Duras\u2019s The Lover, thirty years later. Early in Marguerite Duras\u2019s The Lover, we encounter an indelible image: a strange rag doll of a girl rides the ferry across the Mekong River en route to Saigon. She\u2019s an adolescent, fifteen and a half, and she looks both too young and too old for her age, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":824,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[1627,17924,9043,11780,2475,747,3988,17922,17923,6375,176],"class_list":["post-85212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-akhil-sharma","tag-catherine-lacey","tag-francoise-mouly","tag-kate-zambreno","tag-marguerite-duras","tag-novels","tag-romance","tag-symphony-space","tag-thalia-book-club","tag-the-lover","tag-vietnam"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMarguerite Duras\u2019s \u201cThe Lover\u201d Turns 30<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Writers reflect on the book\u2019s influence and its larger-than-life author, who died in 1996.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/27\/on-a-pedestal\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On a Pedestal by Brian Mastroianni\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 27, 2015 \u2013 Duras\u2019s The Lover, thirty years later. 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