The Lover

This book feels as though, through whispers, someone is confiding in you about an untold life lived long ago, it is fragmented, dulcet and intimate. Her prose are reminiscent of an impressionist painting. It presents a stripped portrayal of form that exudes evocative and abstract imagery using the repetition of dappled memories that weave in and out of the writers consciousness, accentuating the dreamlike quality that memories often evoke.

If you suspect that Dumas is French, then you have obviously been reading my blog for a while and know that I am currently obsessed with all things French. This book was recommended in Great French Books and, since I had it in my TBR (and it's been there for a good year), I decided to give it a read.

Would you like it? Do you like to read stories about poor young women who give themselves to rich fellows? In real life, this apparently happened to Dumas. It's quite sad, really. I'm starting to find that many (most?) French books are quite sad.

”Very early in my life it was too late.”

Deeply disturbing, profoundly sad, and achingly beautiful.

This is an autobiographical work by Marguerite Duras, and we are transported to Saigon and her childhood days through her effortless and gorgeous prose.

Her life was difficult and she shows us this in weirdly detached way. She can see herself from outside, and we see her writing and seeing herself from outside.

I have a whole in my heart and a lump on my throat. This is a very sad book and I'm feeling emotionally drained.

“...I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had,”

Gorgeously beautiful! I couldn't recommend it more.

And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.

P.S: the movie is also very worth it!

I picked this up because Maggie Nelson mentions it in Bluets and this was sitting right on the coffee table within reach when I finished the other book. I started off enjoying it but then it began to falter and by the end of it I was well sick of the story and the writing both. Jean Rhys deals with similar themes (socially unacceptable sex, colonies in the tropics, madness, etc.) much better in Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, and Maidenhead is a contemporary Canadian take on the topic. Set up against those two this book doesn‰ЫЄt stand a chance.

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“Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine. People went to dinner there in the winter. Or to lunch in the summer. The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris. Always passable, almost. But only just enough, skimpy. She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out. Sometimes there was an expert on Mallarme there. And often one, two, or three literary people, they'd come once and never be seen again. I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them. I never heard anyone else refer to any one of them, and I never read or heard of their work. The meals didn't last very long. We talked a lot about the war .... Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn't say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she'd laugh. Straightway after the meal she'd apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said. She never said what. When there were enough of us we'd stay on for an hour or two after she left. She used to say, Stay as long as you like. No one spoke about her when she wasn't there. I don't think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spend a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors' waiting rooms, hotels, airports.”