The image at the center of this novel is a photograph that doesn't exist.
The Lover
A French teenager's affair with a wealthy Chinese man unfolds through Duras's fractured recollections of colonial Indochina.
145g
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Hiking Socks
- Lightweight
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction/Memoir
On a ferry crossing the muddy Mekong, a fifteen-year-old French girl in a fedora meets a wealthy Chinese heir—igniting an illicit, feverish affair in 1930s French Indochina. Duras' autofictional masterwork is a sultry, fragmented autopsy of desire, class, and colonial ruin. Written in hypnotic, incantatory prose, it traces a scar of passion on flesh singed by money, race, and memory. The whole book is as thin as a passport: one trip through its pages will follow you for days.
Field notes
Published in 1984 when Duras was seventy, The Lover won the Prix Goncourt and became an international phenomenon, selling millions of copies. Its origin was far more modest: Duras's son had asked her to write captions for family photographs. But the image around which the novel revolves—the fifteen-year-old girl in a man's fedora crossing the Mekong—was never photographed. Duras called it the absolute photograph, an image whose very absence gave it power.