The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1984)

In 1929, a 15-year-old French girl is travelling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of the 27-year-old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. A passion is born from this encounter. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair. For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it is not until much later that the girl realises her true feelings.

The Lover is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras. It has been translated into 43 languages and was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1984. A film adaptation was made in 1992: The Lover by Jean-Jacques Arnaud.

Author: Marguerite Duras was born on April 14, 1914, in Saigon, Cochinchina, a region of French Indochina (now Vietnam). She died of throat cancer in 1996 in Paris. Duras spent most of her childhood in Indochina, but at the age of 17 she moved to France to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she obtained degrees in law and politics. She was deeply marked by the landscape and the lifestyle of the former French colony, which often served as a backdrop to her work.

My thoughts: I read this book in one day in the Portuguese version; I loved it so much that I read it twice. This is without contest an erotic masterpiece: exhilarating, sensual, melancholy, truthful, modern and female. I quote below the most beautiful piece of her writing:

"Very early in my life, it was too late.

It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book."