Introduction

The Lover by Marguerite Duras is a novel that presents events from Duras’s life but also plays with fiction. The main character, Duras,  is a young French girl that lives in Indochina. The novel tells the story of her life in Colonial French Indochina during the early 1930s. Her father dies when she is very young so it is up to her mother to maintain the family. Her mother is described as a bitter old woman that goes in and out of manic mood swings. Her brother is a brutal, cold person whom she doesn’t care for. The only person in her family that she connects with is her younger brother whom dies while she is away at school. She describes him as being warm, they are able to find happiness when around each other together. When her brother dies, so does apart of her.

One day as she is on the ferry going to boarding school in Saigon, an older Chinese business man notices her and offers her a ride to school. From there, the novel follows their love affair and the challenges that their ‘forbidden love’ endures. The Lover is not written in chronological order. It is cleverly written in the first and third person and the events tend to skip from one to the other as a way to keep the reader intrigued.

This learning guide will help readers understand contextual material having to do with The Lover, as well as a bibliography about Marguerite Duras, literary analysis, and literary review. Hopefully those who read The Lover will find this material useful. Enjoy!