“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then (p. 3). “

This is the classic beginning of The Lover by Marguerite Duras, where the aged narrator when her looks are devastated, longs for a lover who expresses the love that transcends above time.

In this novel, the narrator looks back on her first love and offers her personal reflections on past regrets, sorrow, and joy. Unfolding in the first-person narrative, the novel explores the deep and hopeless love between a poor French teenage girl and a rich Chinese man in his mid-twenties.  For me what makes this story so influential is that it takes the life of the French colonists in Vietnam as the background, where there was a rise of nationalism among Vietnamese people and the idea of racial discriminatory views among French colonists. Under this concept,  this forbidden love between a French girl and a Chinese man highly reflects that love can transcend the prejudice of race, colour, and wealth. 

“I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money. ( p. 40)” In the first part of the novel, the narrator emphasizes that she’s with this Chinese man for the money. Similarly, the rich Chinese man desires her young body and sex. At this point, this seems to be a fair trade. However, I feel great sympathy for the narrator. Her family looms over her like a shadow, the source of all her suffering comes from poverty and her mother. In such a family, her mother always sees her daughter in a patriarchal view and sees her as a commodity, caring about her daughter’s value in the marriage market. Her mother never provided the love a teenager needs, and so she is thirsting for the love she never had.  This accumulated desire for love was satisfied by the sex and love with this man, who cares for her. With the love of sexes, she was able to detach herself from the suffocating coldness that surrounded her. Reversively, this young girl seems to fulfill the desire for freedom of this rich young man under this nationalist context. However, despite such true love, their class and race differences hindered their possibility. 

As the narrator is looking back, without wondering how she faces this sorrow in her heart, she has already admitted from the bottom of her heart that he has loved, she has loved, and money, and interests and it has nothing to do with it. 

“ He 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.129)

In the end, the Chinese man manages to express his love years later, and my question for everyone is, how do you interpret this ending? Do you view this as a tragedy full of regrets or a completion of their complex love story?