The Lover - Marguerite Duras

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now, ravaged…

I read The Lover again, a novel recommended by my high school Chinese teacher. It’s more like a novella, and partly autobiographical, the most famous one by Marguerite Duras (French).

The words are simple and seem empty of feelings; deep emotion lurks under the surface. The narrator is loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways; her eccentricity gets her a bad reputation and few friends at school; her Chinese lover is a coward and his father refuses to let him marry her.

Although the story is a dark one, I enjoy reading it because it makes me feel the mood created by the author, through the said and the unsaid. 'It creates a feeling of a writer haunted by her past, exploring it but grazing across the surface of it rather than digging in deep.'