The non-linear narrative and the coy, curious way she unravels the events of this part of her life, make it difficult to find the boundaries between past and present, youth and age, fact and fiction. I sometimes wondered just how much of young Duras was truly aware of what she was doing, and how much of it was influenced by the fact that Duras is writing about these experiences in retrospect.
There’s a lingering longing in these confessional interjections, as well as some chastisement. Often throughout the retelling, Duras seems to interrupt the past moments with insight from her current perspective as someone much older and experienced. It becomes clear that this has affected her deeply, including the way she sees herself, her place in the world, and everything that happens or anyone else she meets. There’s a severe danger alluded to in her relationship with her brother, and his dominance over her, even when her much older lover is in the room, is bizarre and unsettling. Throughout, she constantly belittles his appearance, his weakness and femininity, in stark contrast to the presence of her older brother, whom is the exact opposite. In episodic, atmospheric descriptions, Duras recounts her relationship with her family, strange and tragic, and with her first lover, a much older Chinese man. Everything prior to this image is innocence, and everything after it, experience. And yet it is this single image that informs the entire memoir, because it sits squarely atop the moment she comes of age. She’s writing about this image from her perspective as a much older woman, aged somewhere around seventy. Duras is referring to the mental image of herself as a young girl–fifteen and a half–standing on a ferry that’s crossing the Mekong River.
It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight” (3-4). It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. The memoir begins this way: “I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s just told in such a dreamy, disconnected, modernist way, that it’s impossible to read it like a memoir unless you’re really trying. After all, it is based on Duras’s real life, real childhood, real family, and real events.
But I took it upon myself to do a little bit more research about the book, and it is actually considered an “autobiographical novel.” We describe those in a variety of ways, but I think creative memoir works. While I was reading Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, which is labeled “Fiction” on its back cover, someone told me, “Oh, that’s a memoir!” To which I responded, “you’re full of sh*t!” Or something more delicate and intellectual, if you’d prefer to think of me that way.
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