In The Lover and The North China Lover, Marguerite Duras writes about first love. Both novels are autobiographical, reflecting Duras’ adolescent experience in the then French colony of Vietnam where she was born in 1914. Her father died in 1918, leaving her mother, a teacher occupying one of the lowliest positions in the colonial hierarchy, to tend for Duras and her two brothers.


Both of these novels paint a poignant picture of Duras’ miserable upbringing. Her family was pitted into dire poverty after her mother was lured by the corrupt colonial administration into putting all her savings into the purchase of a worthless plot of land, subject to flooding by the sea. ‘It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society’, Duras writes, ‘We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves’. Feelings of shame and anger towards one another and the outside world, enveloped in the fear of not having enough to survive on economically, thereafter tarnished the lives of Duras and her siblings.


It is within this context that ‘the girl’, i.e. Duras herself at age fifteen and a half, lounging on the ferry crossing the Mekong river, ‘wearing a man’s flat brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a black ribbon’, attracts the interest of the very elegant rich Chinese man inside the big black limousine. ‘... how important it was to be in my life, that event, the crossing of the river’, she relates. The sudden attraction is mutually shared and they instantly become lovers. ‘He’s a man who must make love a lot’, Duras reveals, ‘I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and what to say’. Day in day out, his formidable chauffeur diligently comes to fetch her from the boarding school. But the love story that develops is much more complex than what one might guess to be an older man’s fetishistic attraction for a ‘little white girl’ or an ‘impoverished white lay-about’s scheme to exploit a Chinese millionaire. His bachelor’s quarters not only represent the locus of their boundless intimacy but also a safe haven which enables them to escape from their respective predicaments.


In The Lover, Duras’ Goncourt Prize (the Goncourt is the best-known French literary award) novel, one senses a strain of resentment in the author’s tone. It is as if she is telling the love story (her love story) without really wanting to, as though she felt compelled to write as an attempt to stop this experience from recurring in her mind. ‘I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken’, Duras relates at the outset, ‘It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight’. But she holds back from delving into the emotional breadth of their love story, choosing instead to depict it in a minimalist way: ‘Because of his ignorance she suddenly knows: she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone’.


In this novel, Duras tends to defy her emotions ‘it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him’, she asserts, ‘it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on living. This is because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man’. When he takes her famished family out to dinner, for example, they all behave as though they have granted him a favour in accepting his invitation and treat him as though he were an inferior person, showing contempt for his envied wealth.


In The Lover, Duras resists from overtly acknowledging the strength of her great love. She abstains from revealing her emotions to her lover and sharing them with her readers. When, in tremendous desperation, he confronts her about the impossibility of their love as being against the marital arrangements set out for him by his family, she resists coming to grips with the grievous situation and simply says to him that ‘I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons’. In this version ‘the girl’ tastes and lives out the fruits of first love while tacitly accepting its annihilation. But at the end, as she bids farewell to the big black limousine majestically ‘gazing’ at her (with the lover inside) on the steam boat departing for France, she realizes how much she has withheld: ‘She’d wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn’t weep for that kind of lover’.


And it is with the realization that The Lover simply scraped the surface of things that Duras resolved to do justice to the true colours of their love story in The North China Lover. Upon discovery of his death, Duras explains in the prelude ‘I stopped the work I was doing. I wrote the story of the North China lover and the child: it wasn’t quite there in The Lover, I hadn’t given them enough time. This book is a novel containing many features of a screenplay, such as the meticulous visual descriptions of possible settings, since Duras hoped that it would ultimately be recaptured on film (which it was in 1992 by director Jean Jacques Annaud).


Still written in her typical disjointed style (for this is not an author for smooth transitions), in this version Duras handles their love story with great care and tenderness. Instead of objectifying her protagonists as ‘the girl’ and ‘the Chinese man’, Duras calls them ‘the child’ and ‘the North China lover’, identities that inevitably suggest the youth and innocence, the care and protectiveness enveloped in their intimacy. She comes to grips with her sorrow throughout the course of the novel and takes great pains to transcribe into words an ecstasy of love reduced to the harsh process of separation.


The North China Lover effusively articulates the emotional breadth of ‘the wild happiness of first love and the unrelieved, incurable pain of having lost it’. Realizing that ‘the two are merged in the pain of love’, the child ‘talks to him, she tells him she will always love him. She thinks she will love him all her life. It will be the same for him too. They have both ruined themselves forever’. It is no surprise, then, that at the moment of her departure, the child already mourns the sense of lifelong loss, ‘the strange tragedy of betraying the destiny they realize was theirs’. And when he does telephone her years later, this time she is brave enough to include her own reaction: ‘He heard her crying on the telephone. And then from further off, probably from her room — she hadn’t hung up — he could still hear her crying’.


Both of these novels are essential works of contemporary French literature; neither is necessarily ‘better’ or ‘more finished’ than the other and together they form a masterpiece. The first lays out the trajectory for the personal catharsis that awaits Marguerite Duras in the second when she tries to come to grips with the depth of her emotions.

‘They smile at each other. Desire returns. They stop smiling at each other. He dresses her. And then looks at her again. Looks at her. She, she is already part Chinese. She knows that, the child. She looks at him and, for the first time, she discovers that another place has always been there between her and him. Since their first glance. Another place that protects them, a sheer, inviolable space. A sort of far-off, childhood — China — why not? — one that would protect them from all knowledge that might be foreign to it. And that is how she discovers that she, she protects him just as he himself does from events like adulthood, death, sadness at evening, the solitude of wealth, the solitude of misery that is born of love as much as desire.’ (The North China Lover) p74