The Lover - Marguerite Duras

This year I read, again, Marguerite Duras’s cult 1984 novel The Lover, first published in France 40 years ago this autumn, on a train from Paris to the South of France. The winter break, or vacances d’hiver, had just started and my carriage overflowed with surly adolescents eating pungent snacks and broadcasting loud content from their phones. This environment threw me a sharp prompt: what, age 35, was I doing still returning to a work I first read as a teenager? What, almost 15 years after it was a set text on an undergraduate French literature syllabus, still drew me to The Lover, when its premise of a scandalous affair between a 15-year-old white girl and an older wealthy Chinese man in 1...Read more