She owes it to herself to do so, so she does, her cousins are all that’s left of the family, so she shows them the family photos.
“So my mother has only the photographs left to show, so she shows them, naturally, reasonably, shows her cousins her children. The protagonist is particularly interested in her mother, to whom she at first tries to ingratiate herself and then simply to understand her and to empathize. Similar to the narrator in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, the protagonist of The Lover acts as philosopher-narrator, often asking rhetorical questions and ruminating on the character of each of her family members. And yet her setting and characters are deeply developed and three-dimensional. It took me a while to get used to the author’s structure and to orient myself in the story. Her memories are scattered and often seem unrelated to each other. The structure of the story is that of an older woman looking back on her past and offering insight into her actions as an adolescent after decades of experience and reflection. In my experience, I have found that many books of an experimental style tend to be shorter, as if to make it easier for a reader to digest. This style, however, begs the question: would The Lover have been successful if it had been a longer book? At 117 pages, it could almost be classified as a novella. But all of these aspects are also what make the novel so compelling.
The narrator jumps from first person point of view to third throughout, as the protagonist deals with varying degrees of trauma. The text is dreamy and at times confusing. There is no dialogue (in the traditional sense), very little “scene”, and few transitions between segments. A reader will find very little here in the way of a traditional novel. If I had to criticize the novel, I would say its lyricism is not only its greatest strength but also a potential weakness. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach (pp 81-82).” The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. For example, from pages 81-82, “The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. In fact, the entire novel reads like one long prose poem. Her analogies and themes are consistent and poignant throughout. First, the prose itself is lyrical and unique. There are several things I admire about Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. What a perfect novel to read following Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream.
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