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1、THELOVERPartI ONEDAY,Iwasalreadyold,in theentranceofapublicplaceamancameuptome.Heintroducedhimselfand said:Iveknownyouforyears.Everyonesaysyouwerebeautifulwhenyouwereyoung, butIwanttotellyouIthinkyouremorebeautifulnowthanthen.Ratherthanyourfaceasayoungwoman,Iperferyourfaceasitisnow.Ravaged. Ioftenth
2、inkoftheimageonlyIcanseenow,andofwhichIveneverspoken.Itsalwaysthere,in thesamesilence,amazing.ItstheonlyimageofmyselfIlike,theonlyoneinwhichIrecognizemyself, inwhichIdelight. Veryearlyinmylifeitwastoolate.Itwasalready toolatewhenIwaseighteen.Betweeneighteenandtwenty-fivemyfacetookoffinanewdirection.
3、Igrewoldateighteen.Idontknowifitsthe sameforeveryone.Iveneverasked.ButIbelieve Iveheardofthewaytimecansuddenlyaccelerate onpeoplewhentheyregoingthrougheventhemostyouthfulandhighlyesteemedstagesoflife. Myageingwasverysudden.Isawitspreadovermyfeaturesonebyone,changingtherelationship betweenthem,making
4、theeyeslarger,theexpressionsadder,themouthmorefinal,leaving greatcreasesintheforehead.Butinsteadofbeing dismayedIwatchedthisprocesswiththesamesortofinterestimighthavetakeninthereadingofabook.AndIknewIwasright,thatonedayit wouldslowdownandtakeitsnormalcourse.The peoplewhoknewmeatseventeen,whenIwent t
5、oFrance,weresurprisedwhentheysawmeagaintwoyearslater,atnineteen.AndIvekeptitever since,thenewfaceIhadthen.Ithasbeenmyface. Itsgotolderstill,ofcourse,butless,comparatively,thanitwouldotherwisehavedone.Itsscoredwithdeep,drywrinkles,theskiniscracked.Butmyfacehasntcollapsed,assomewithfine featureshavedo
6、ne.Itskeptthesamecontours,but itssubstancehasbeenlaidwaste.Ihaveafacelaid waste.THELOVERPartII So,Imfifteenandahalf.ItsonaferrycrossingtheMekongriver.Theimagelastsallthewayacross.Imfifteenandahalf,therearenoseasonsinthat partoftheworld,wehavejustoneseason,hot, monotonous,wereinthelonghotgirdleofthee
7、arth,withnospring,norenewal. ImatastateboardingschoolinSaigon.Ieatand sleepthere,butIgotoclassesattheFrenchhigh school.Mymothersateacherandwantshergirl tohaveasecondaryeducation.Youhavetogoto highschool.Whatwasenoughforherisnot enoughforherdaughter.Highschoolandthena gooddegreeinmathematics.Thatwasw
8、hathad beendinnedintomeeversinceIstartedschool.It nevercrossedmymindImightescapethemathe- maticsdegree,Iwasgladtogiveherthathope. EverydayIsawherplanningherownandher childrensfuture.Therecameatimewhenshe couldntplananythingverygrandforhersons anymore,sosheplannedotherfutures,makeshift ones,buttheyto
9、oservedtheirpurpose,they blockedinthetimethatlayahead.Iremembermy youngerbrotherscoursesinbook-keeping.From theUniversalCorrespondenceSchool-every year,everylevel.Youhavetocatchup,mymother usedtosay.Itwouldlastforthreedays,neverfour. Never.WeddroptheUniversalSchoolwhenever mymotherwaspostedtoanother
10、place.Andbegin againinthenext.Mymotherkeptitupforten years.Itwasntanygood.Myyoungerbrother becameanaccountantsclerkinSaigon.Therewas notechnicalschoolincolonies;weowedmy elderbrothersdepartureforFrancetothat.He stayedinFranceforseveralyearstostudyatthe technicalschool.Buthedidntkeepitup.My mothermus
11、thaveknown.Butshehadnochoice, hehadtobegotawayfromtheothertwochildren. Forseveralyearshewasnolongerpartofthe family.Itwaswhilehewasawaythatmymother boughttheland,theconcession.Aterriblebusiness, butforus,thechildrenwhowereleft,notsoter- ribleasthepresenceofthekillerwhowouldhavebeen, thechild-killero
12、fthenight,ofthenightofthe hunter.The Lover-DurasThe Lover (French title: LAmant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les ditions de Minuit. It has been translated to 43 languages. It was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt. The Lover is also a 1992 movie based on this n
13、ovel, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai. The cast also included Lisa Faulkner. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.Summary of the movieSet against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies an
14、d intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl (Jane March), from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka-Fai). The story is narrated by Jeanne Moreau, portraying a writer looking back on her youth. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl i
15、s traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the village of Sadec, to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of a 32 year old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a tidy fortune. He strikes up a conver
16、sation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic-depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. Thus, sh
17、e becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair. For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it isnt until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings. Duras real-life Chinese lover was named Lee
18、. The last she heard of him, he became a born again Christian and loved his family very much. He died and was buried in the same city in Vietnam where Duras first met him. Duras was only 15 at the time of her love affair, which is the age of the heroine in the novel.Marguerite Donnadieu, better know
19、n as Marguerite Duras (French IPA: magit dyas) (April 4, 1914 March 3, 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born in Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam), her father died,her mother raised her with her two brother , they were very poor,the mother went practicly mad, she ( the mother
20、) use to beat her children and even made marguerite a sort of prostitute.when she got 18 she went to France, her parents native country, to study law, but became a writer instead. She changed her name in 1943 for Duras, the name of a village in the Lot-et-Garonne dpartement, where her fathers house
21、was located. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films and short narratives, including her best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work LAmant (1984), translated into English as The Lover. Following the making of a film of the same name(s) (1992, LAmant, The Lover) based on her work,
22、Duras then published a slightly different work, LAmant de la Chine du Nord. Other major works include Moderato Cantabile, also made into a film of the same name, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and her film India Song. She was also the screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which
23、was directed by Alain Resnais. Durass early novels were fairly conventional in form (their romanticism was criticised by fellow writer Raymond Queneau); however, with Moderato Cantabile she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She w
24、as associated with the Nouveau roman French literary movement. Her films are also experimental in form, most eschewing synch sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story over images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less tangential. She died at 81 from throat cancer an
25、d is interred in the Cimetire du Montparnasse.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 h
26、er 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 admin
27、istration into putting all her savings into the purchase of a worthless plot of land, subject to flooding by the sea. Its here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mothers children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society, Duras writes, Were on
28、the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of whats 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,
29、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 mans flat brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a black ribbon, attracts the interest of the v
30、ery 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. Hes a man who must make love a lot, Duras reveals, Im very lucky, obvio
31、usly, its 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 mans f
32、etishistic attraction for a little white girl or an impoverished white lay-abouts scheme to exploit a Chinese millionaire. His bachelors 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 Love
33、r, Duras Goncourt Prize (the Goncourt is the best-known French literary award) novel, one senses a strain of resentment in the authors 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 experien
34、ce from recurring in her mind. I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which Ive never spoken, Duras relates at the outset, Its always there, in the same silence, amazing. Its the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight. But she holds b
35、ack 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 em
36、otions its taken for granted I dont love him, that Im with him for the money, that I cant love him, she asserts, its impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on living. This is because hes a Chinese, because hes not a white man. When he takes her famished family out
37、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
38、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 sim
39、ply says to him that I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didnt 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 gazi
40、ng at her (with the lover inside) on the steam boat departing for France, she realizes how much she has withheld: Shed wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtnt weep for that kind of lover.And it is with the realization that The Lover simply scraped the surfac
41、e 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 wasnt quite there in The Lover, I ha
42、dnt 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 typ
43、ical 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 ine
44、vitably 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 e
45、ffusively 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 w
46、ill 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 hadnt hung up he could still hear her crying.Both of the
