Author: Marguerite Duras
Year: 1986 (1984)
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish (Translator Madeleine Gustafsson)
A distant
acquaintance of mine, whose creative work I have been following for some time,
is valiantly toiling and moiling on a manuscript which I am sure will one day
become a literary masterpiece. Its working title inspired me to read a
temporarily better-known novel; “Älskaren” (“The Lover”) by French novelist and
playwright Marguerite Duras.
The only
thing this book and that of my friend’s have in common is the title so let me
begin this review from that end. For it is indeed curious how potently a title
or a keyword can guide our thoughts and our attention. Goodreads introduce "Älskaren" as “The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine
romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and
an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man.” Penguin Random House present it as
“the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and
her Chinese lover.” Bookmate calls it “unforgettable portrayal of the
incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly
tears the girl’s family apart.”
My question
to all these reviewers is; is it though? I wonder what the reviews would sound
like if the title of the book had been something else. What would each of these
readers see, what would they notice, what would they take with them if the
title had been “The Mother” or “The Family”? How would they introduce the same content
had it borne “The Anger”, “The Pride”, or “The Anguish” on the cover?
When I read
Duras’s novel, I do not see a doomed love story between a man and a woman
separated by money, race, or age. To me, “Älskaren” is an elderly woman’s
final stand against her childhood trauma, a testament to failed motherhood from
the perspective of an emotionally abused daughter. It is a cathartic scream of
misery, resistance, and grievance. It is the long-overdue truth spoken to a
power no longer alive. The actual lover in the novel plays a role not much
different from the burning giraffe in Salvador Dali’s famous painting. He is but
an alibi; a key that unlocks a box of emotions. He is there to make a woman out
of the girl. He is there to unveil the ugliness of her family’s iniquity,
arrogance, and racism. But the book is not about him. It is about her.
Although we
never learn the name of the narrator, it is widely accepted that the book is
largely autobiographic, and the characters are very thinly veiled. The name of
the narrator’s hysterical mother, for instance, is Marie Legrand. Duras’s real
mother’s maiden name was also Legrand. Duras herself used the pseudonym “Mary
Josephine Legrand” while writing for Elle Magazine many years before the book.
“Marguerite Duras”, by the way, is also a nom de plume as the writer’s real
name is Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras being the small municipality in
Lot-et-Garonne in southern France whence her family originated and where her
father was buried).
Stylistically,
The Lover follows the norm of the Noveau Roman. The narration addresses
observations rather than facts, the chronology is broken. The narrator jumps freely
and seemingly haphazardly between telling the story in the first and third
person. The language is introverted but lively, poetic, at times almost
ceremonious. Some parts are like a slow-flowing river, perhaps mimicking the
Mekong River on the banks of which much of the story unfolds. Thoughts come and
go, sometimes mid-sentence, emerge for a moment and disappear beneath the surface
again. But now and again, a word or phrase anchors the story in the
consciousness of the reader. Like a gunshot. “Very early in my life, it was too
late”, or “Alcohol took over the function that God had never had” may serve as
such examples.
"Älskaren" is a tiny piece of literature as worldly dimensions go, my paperback copy is a
little over 100 pages, and should not take the average reader longer than a
couple of hours to read. I hereby submit that they should be hours well spent.
