L'Amant Reading Order

L'Amant (The Lover, 1984) by Marguerite Duras is the memoir-novel that brought Duras to international audiences and won the Prix Goncourt when she was seventy. Narrated by an older woman looking back at her adolescence in French colonial Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s, it tells of her affair with a wealthy Chinese man when she was fifteen and he was twenty-seven — an affair complicated by colonial hierarchy (the Chinese man is rich but colonised), by class (the French girl is poor but white), by the explicit understanding that the affair will end (her family will not permit the relationship to become permanent), and by the retrospective certainty that it left a mark on both of them that never healed. Duras's prose in L'Amant is discontinuous, circling back on itself, refusing chronology, mixing the past with the present of the narrative act — a technique that mirrors the way memory actually works, returning to images rather than reconstructing events. The novel is also, in parts, a portrait of Duras's family — her brutal older brother, her beloved younger brother who died young — and of the specific misery and beauty of a colonial childhood. L'Amant is one of the most widely read French novels of the last half-century, translated into forty languages and made into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1992.