The Lover had been on my Want to Read list for two days when I saw it, enveloped in the sepia dust of another time, in the secondhand section of my second favourite bookshop in the city. Marguerite Duras’ face on the cover, eyelids weighing down; a face you immediately put to the main character of the story, which was, in fact, fictionalised autobiography.
Barely into the second page of the book, our protagonist declares: “Very early in my life it was too late.” And I had to backtrack and tweak the face on the front cover. A drop of sadness in her eyes, an untangling of her sleaked-back hair, a little more rouge à levres. Now it is her turn to backtrack, our narrator who is so fond of skipping over years and names. It was at eighteen, she says, that she really began aging.
She is fifteen and a half years old when she starts the story. The half is of indisputable importance, as it would be at fifteen. A matter of old and young, of too late and too early.
This copy of The Lover is old. It has a post-it note on the inside, unsigned but addressed to an “Anu.” An unusual note, for the gifter does not wish a happy birthday or anniversary or end it with love, but asks “Have you read this one Anu?” before telling Anu what they thought of it. A little plot description, nevermind the one printed on the back of the book.
There are no chapters in The Lover, just breaks. Nothing but paragraphs to split decades and continents. She flits between them without respite, throwing you off your feet but never off her ever-rocking boat of thought.
A war rages in the background. The turmoil is everywhere. In the raging of a brother’s temper. In the silence that descends between the kisses and the crying. The young girl that stares at the ceiling, stares at the delicate tearful face of a friend and registers her body under a nightgown and the lines on her face. The girl that remembers the exact second her mother changed and had to keep herself from calling out to her.
The surroundings engulf you. It is nearing the end of colonial times in French-colonised Vietnam. The air is hot and sticky, the Mekong river is vast and skimmed by dragonflies and mosquitoes and ferries. Our protagonist is old before her time. The last half-year of her life is insisted upon. How much weight those six months must hold. She carries all the years, forgives little, speaks not at all.
Her lover is nothing but that: the lover. She tells of his love like it was worship. A love she was taken by, picked up and placed into, like his black limousine every afternoon outside her school, waiting, wordless. She has tears for him, she has teeth and mouth, but not many words. He has wealth, an immense amount.
She has come of age by the time you leave her, crossed the river twice and then sailed on a ship to France. And she has left you wondering, a lot. Was it easy for her to get into his car? The first time? The second time? With the young man with the cigar and the fedora, whose name and features we are not allowed but who we can see, as she does?
It was immediately after the whirlwind that was The Lover that I picked up Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, a novella that I finished in one sitting. Reading the two back to back left me disarmed, in a way I can only attempt to explain. In the limbo of June and July, coupled with the rain and the clouds in the corner of my vision, the daze will not lift until I pull some of it down, weighted by Duras’ soft low eyelids.
The similarities were there. They’re both French translations, they chronicle two very different (but both secretive) love affairs. The main characters are not called by name. (Ernaux refers to the man her protagonist is seeing as “A,” which is generous.) The musical quality of translation is so severely stark and beautiful throughout both. Sentences that would never exist if they were originally in English. A construction of words that has both added and taken away.
The lack of names only adds to the closeness. There he is, he who held her in arms described to such detail that you are nearly being held yourself, who shared things with her that the pages shudder with. Yet you are not given his name. That’s for her to keep, to remember by and forget by. He is untraceable to us, to her even.
All you get is a nationality, a race. The Chinese man. The Slav. A social status. The wealthy Chinese man and the poor French girl from a dysfunctional family. A marital status. The married Slav man. The contour of bodies, not shied away from.
Unlike our fifteen and a half year old narrator, the almost middle-aged protagonist of Simple Passion tells us of her own feelings. She opens the book with the ‘shattering’ she felt the first time she watched an X-rated film. She is a woman who waits and waits and waits and waits and waits; her entire life divided between waiting and receiving: the phone call, the man.
I immediately thought of the short story A Telephone Call by Dorothy Parker. I first read it in class three years ago and the disarming feeling of understanding a characters pathetic yet unabashed imploring that I had felt then came back to me. Only here, it was silent, a secret crushed between mouth and reciever. The desperation in Parker’s character made all the blood rush to your head and your heart, and it feels like any minute now, the trill of the telelphone will interject. In Simple Passion, doom hangs over every reiteration of the word ‘wait.’
Everything makes its way back to this man for her, and if it doesn’t, it’s of no importance. Nothing to write down, or even register. It is a declaration which she makes on the third page, the very start: from September of last year, she has done nothing but wait for a man.
It’s almost defiant. She’s challenging you, saying, oh well what are you going to do about it? Here it is, the entire story and a search for what it means. A coming-of-age novella in itself, I think.
And that, you can’t help but admire.
I wonder where Anu is, the mysterious previous owner of my copy of The Lover, why she had to give this book away. The intrigue is intact with what follows: the book, the lack of names, even on the post-it note itself.
How long did this book sit around on tables and laps and shelves before finding itself in a shelf or an attic somewhere, gathering the specks that only rain through a ceiling and time can leave on paperbacks? Did she enjoy it? Had she already read it?
I wonder if Anu is no longer alive. It would make sense: all her books in cardboard boxes for months, waiting to be held again. I wonder about her often; her and her anonymous book-giver, whose book and words I now possess.
Hell yeah