The Lover - Marguerite Duras
Do you ever finish a book and find yourself thinking that you enjoyed it but that if somebody asked you to tell them about it you wouldn't be able to? That's what happened with The Lover for me.
Written in the 1980s, The Lover is a work of autobiography that looks back to the 1920s. The author/narrator is 15 years old and living in Southeast Asia - at the time French Indochina - with her mother, who is ill in a non-specific way. They're not wealthy, and life is a struggle. Then the narrator enters a sexual relationship with a much older Chinese millionaire.
I knew that this was autobiographical but I was expecting it to be much closer to autofiction. As it turns it, this leans much heavier on the biography side of the spectrum (despite the subtitle of the book literally being "A Novel"). As a result it comes with many of the facets of biography - no real narrative 'arc', and no real sense of progression or climax. That's compounded by the narrative style here; it's fragmentary, jumping from memory to memory, spanning geography and time without ever giving us a chance to get situated. Our understanding of what's going on is also hindered by the emotional distance in the text, the narrator simply reciting events to us without giving us any access to her feelings or emotions. The majority of the characters are nameless, and the voice is dispassionate and detached, making this a tough read at times.
The one time this changes is when the narrator recounts - in a very short section that must be no more than a few pages long - her obsession with a 17 year old girl who lives in the boarding house with her. Hélène is described in terms that almost deify her, and the narrator fantasies about her in a way that finally lifts the veil that's been hanging over her internality throughout the rest of the book. We're finally able to see her as human and real rather than just a disembodied voice.
After sitting with the book for a while, I've begun to wonder whether Hélène actually existed. I think it's clear that the rest of the events are largely true (and, I think, mostly unembellished). The fact they Hélène is the only named character leads me to the conclusion that she's also the only character, the only person present in this narrative who isn't real. Is she, then, a fantasy invented by the narrator as a means of coping with the things that happened to her as a child?
It's inevitable that any book about a child being abused by any older man will draw comparisons with Lolita, and this was certainly sold to me as being "the French Lolita". I think that's an unfair comparison, not least because comparing anybody to one of the greatest English-language prose stylists to ever do it is inherently unfair, but also because comparing fiction to autobiography isn't really a valid comparison either. And yet looking at this through a lens coloured by Lolita actually helped me to access it a little more once I was finished with it. If we imagine Lolita as narrated by Dolores, sixty years after she met H.H., what might that narrative look like? Memory, particularly traumatised memory, is not consistent or coherent. Her story would likely be fragmented, as this is. And perhaps she would be dispassionate and detached in the telling, too.
This was a tough book to start the year with, and I'm not sure it's a book I'd necessarily recommend, but I'm definitely glad I read it.