I like to say that I have read plenty of horrible romance stories in my lifetime, and have seen plenty of interesting (read: “disturbing”) tropes regarding relationships in the process. So when I received a content warning regarding this book, I simply brushed it aside thinking that it wouldn’t be too bad on my end.
For reference, I have survived reading the Twilight series, “After Forever”, briefly looking over the accursed, satirical coronavirus romance trilogy, and having to glimpse over more unhinged premises of books I would love to unread.
Admittedly, “The Lover” (Marguerite Duras) isn’t as bad as the examples I had listed above. But it still has some elements that some people would not be okay with as a plot point (namely a romantic relationship between 2 people with very different ages).
So imagine if Lolita was autobiographical and was written from the perspective of the titular character.
That’s pretty much the premise of this book.
But while both relationships are absolutely inappropriate, but a girl in her mid-teens (and especially when it is told through her perspective) is going to be read a lot differently compared to a book written through the predator’s perspective about a pre-teen girl.
And in the case of Duras’s novel, she at least desires her rich Chinese partner, she has some agency in what is happening, even though her hand is forced by the abuse in her family (which is such a typical unfortunate situation in real life as well — to simply swap one form of abuse for another). So her relationship is also a story of abuse.
Duras makes it clear that as a young girl, she felt forced by necessity to become involved with an older man in order to survive based on several factors. Her family was incredibly poor. Her mentally unsound mother forbade the relationship. But the lover was generous, and their family desperately needed the money. Then, she screams at her daughter and beat her (with the lover being a way to escape her pain).
This is not just an average love story, or an average story about the tragedies of poverty, or a story about how the loved ones in her life mistreated her. She just wants to write down what happened and make peace with it. The result is something that is unexpectedly beautiful and meaningful.
After all, there’s genuinely nothing wrong with a person recounting their truth in light of their experiences.
What exactly does it mean to love a person? Do you think it is true romantic love if one gets into a relationship based on a financial necessity?