Tag Archives: love

03/12/24

The Lover – just no

The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

I cannot say I enjoyed reading this week’s novel as much as I thought I would. Maybe because it was confusing, with the change of perspectives and no clear chronological timeline throughout the novel but with different paragraphs mentioning different events or people in the girl’s life. One page would talk about her son and then the other about when she was fifteen, which was a bit confusing for me. In addition, I thought the younger brother she was talking about was the smallest child until like the last half of the book when she mentioned them being seventeen and eighteen, so I had to look at them from another perspective again.

For me, more than the relationship between the girl and the older Chinese man, I kept my focus more on the dynamics of her family, probably because the parts with the man was so hard to read that I had to take multiple breaks reading it TT. With a dead father and an abusive older brother, it was clear she had issues with the masculine figures in her life, leading to her perverse, weird relationship with an older man. But also about her mother, I could almost relate to her as I have two older brothers, the oldest of which is much much more loved by my mom. It reminded me of the love moms have for their sons, praising them for the smallest things, turning a blind eye to their misdoings because they’re their oh so perfect son. Anyways every character in the book was too depressing that it made it hard to enjoy the book as much!! As much as I love complex, intricate relationships and sad yet beautiful stories, this one was just a bit too much..

The relationship between the girl and the ‘Chinese man’ (which was emphasized a LOT throughout the novel, perhaps to highlight the racial differences as well as their class and age), was very disturbing yet complex. Because it was written from the girl’s perspective, their true actions and the way he is literally grooming her are blurry, leading us readers to think about and even doubt the man’s role in the relationship. It makes me think about how such sickening relationships can be almost seen as ‘acceptable’? just because of the different characteristics of the person in authority. He was less masculine than the average person and was not deemed as powerful because of his race as well as how he behaved. He was ‘scared’ a lot, trembled when he talked to her, which made her think she was the one in control, the object of infatuation. It kind of reminded me of the movie ‘Lolita’, even though I haven’t watched it I know that it is about a relationship between a little girl and an older man, and is discussed about to almost ‘fool’ other girls into thinking it was a love story when in fact it was not.

“He’s twelve years older than I, and this scares him. I listen to the way he speaks, makes mistakes, makes love even—with a sort of theatricality at once contrived and sincere.”

Also I just found out that the author also wrote the script for ‘Hiroshima mon amour’, which is a french new-wave movie I’ve been wanting to watch for a long time!! There may lie similarities between the two pieces and I will be analyzing them!!

My question is:

Do you think ‘The Lover’ as a title was trying to define the girl or the man? Or does it have a different meaning?

01/30/24

The Shrouded Woman – no ragrets?

‘The Shrouded Woman’ by María Luisa Bombal.

There is a theory that says your brain is still active for 7 minutes after you die. I think about it a lot, I was reminded of it reading this novel as well. During that seven minutes, I like to think every person would just think back on their lives and evaluate the ups and downs. As much as the book is a work of fiction with a dead woman literally seeing her surroundings and recounting her life, none of us would ever know what really happens after death. Perhaps we drown into eternal darkness, or we turn into a ghost and be able to see everything in third perspective, or perhaps we pass the bridge between life and death like the book described.

“Oh! to cross that bridge and to stretch out full length on the snow on the other side, so that seconds, minutes, hours, days and years of silence might fall and fall on her face, on her limbs, on her tired heart!”

I guess this is why reading fiction about death, and hence life is interesting, because we have not yet solved the great enigma that is death, because we can let our minds wander with creativity when writing about it! Anyways, this novel is, of the three books we have read so far, my favorite, partly because it was easier to read with shorter sentences, or because it was from a woman’s perspective which I could relate with while reading it. Ana Maria, on her death bed, starts reminiscing about her life filled with pain, regrets, jealousy as well as love (painfully so). It is implied that her life was not the greatest to look back on, especially with the regretful decisions of staying with the loathsome husband Antonio, or less significant ones like not forgiving a once dear friend Sofia after her betrayal.  It makes me wonder how much of our lives would we regret after dying, after not being able to fix anything. Ana Maria seems to be excited for the death awaiting her, for her ‘second’ death after a life lived like the dead. A ‘death of the dead’. Her accepting her death without protests, eager to finally rest her tired mind in peace seemed sad yet beautiful to me – it was a bittersweet ending. What was more tragic to me was the reality of women stuck in unhappy marriages, not knowing whether her feelings are coming from love or hatred. The women in the novel were painted with such negative undertones in my opinion; of jealousy, betrayal, and pain. Also, one part that felt odd and a bit funny was how Maria Griselda was so gorgeous that it brought suffering wherever she was, to herself and to others. It is ironic to think that this beauty would bring such sorrow.

I read the book from the PDF that was on the website, which was a scanned version of the book already read and annotated. It was really fun to read the little notes with the texts, and some of them even helped me understand parts where I had challenges comprehending.

Another thing I want to mention is I was listening to random movie soundtracks while reading the ending, and a weird coincidence happened! Right during the priest’s speech of how Ana Maria would think heaven is like the Garden of Eden as a child, this soundtrack of the movie Minari, ‘Garden of Eden’ by Emile Mosseri was playing in the background!

My question is: If you had a chance to review your life on your death bed, would you think more about the regrets or the joyful moments?