From practically the moment she meets le Chinois, she is fascinated by his physicality - she is the aggressor in their relationship, and it seems as though she is acting from real feeling, not just aping the actions of adults in order to produce a desired effect.ДЄt the same time, it's not completely positive for her, or comfortable to read her experiences of actually having sex, especially at first, involve a lot more pain and suffering than pleasure, and she seems perplexed by the strength of Le Chinois's emotions when he falls in love with her. She is already involved in a semi-sexual relationship with one of her female school friends, and the two of them fantasize about taking the place of their prostitute teacher - the idea of forbidden sex being thrilling to them. She has incestuous thoughts about her younger brother, with whom she is extremely close. There's no question that l'enfant lusts after le Chinois - that her psyche is, in fact, super-saturated with lust. In this light, her meeting with and choice to pursue her wealthy lover (known in the novel as le Chinois or The Chinaman) seems a clear economic decision, the best she can do in a bad situation.Д«ut things are not so simple. In her boarding school, certain teachers and even students choose to prostitute themselves in the streets. The main character, known only as 'l'enfant' ('the child'), comes from a desperately poor family of French settlers in Indochina we later learn that she has already had several offers of marriage/concubinage from men in their thirties, which her mother has pressed her to accept in order to alleviate the family's poverty, but which she has refused. Compared to, say, Lolita, which argues pretty plainly for Humbert as a delusional, dirty old man and Delores Haze as his victim, Duras's moral universe is extremely murky. A cinematic approach, then, plays perfectly into one of Duras's main themes in this novel: the ambiguity of human actions.ДЇor L'amant de la chine du nord does not leave the reader with any clear answers about why the characters act as they do, or how we ought to feel about it. And secondly, in a film all the viewer knows about a character's motivations is how she sees them acting - she has no direct access to their interior monologue. The hot monsoon nights, the flooded rice fields, the night sounds of the young Vietnamese night guards singing outside the gates of the main character's colonial boarding school - presenting all this to the audience front-and-center brings it to the foreground, and persuades the reader to concentrate on it, to see it. In the first place, this is one of those books in which the setting is almost as much of a character as the characters themselves.

But in Duras's case I think it works perfectly for two reasons. This kind of narration is often a turn-off for me I tend to find it choppy or overly mannered. Given that plot there's obviously a lot to talk about here vis-a-vis sexual and gender dynamics, but let's get some formalist stuff out of the way first: Duras's prose is vivid and lush, and the fact that she wrote this novel as if giving screen directions (including camera pans, fade-ins and fade-outs, etc.), makes the reading experience overwhelmingly visual. Well, let me be blunter: it tells the story of her first consummated affair, with a wealthy 28-year-old Chinese man, when she was fourteen. Both L'amant and L'amant de la chine du nord are fictionalized memoirs dealing with Duras's sexual coming-of-age as a young - very young - Frenchwoman in 1920s Vietnam (then French Indochina). Duras's book is actually a re-working of her earlier novel L'amant it re-envisions the story as a film, and retells it from a more complete, possibly mature angle. Le ClГ©zio's Ourania, was something of a struggle for me and took several months to complete, I'm startled to find that I've already finished my first French book of 2010: Marguerite Duras's L'amant de la chine du nord (available in English translation as The North China Lover). As you can tell, I'm practically signing up for ГЂ la recherche du temps perdu already.Д¬onsidering that last year's pick, J.M.G. Maybe the year after that I'll read three. So, in order to top that, this year I'll need to read.two. How many is 'more'? Well, last year I read a grand total of one. Inspired by Richard's commitment to multi-lingual reading and blogging, I've decided to try to work on my languages as well, and read more novels in the original French.

The lover duras characters