Book of a lifetime: The Lover by Marguerite Duras

From The Independent archive: Deborah Levy experiences both revelation and confrontation in one of the most devastating and brutally truthful seductions ever written

A reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous: Duras at her desk at home in Paris, 1952 (AFP via Getty Images)

I was 29 when I first read Marguerite Duras’s 1984 masterpiece, The Lover, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. A revelation and a confrontation in equal measure, it was as if I had burst out of an oak-panelled 19th-century gentleman’s club into something exhilarating, sexy, melancholy, truthful, modern and female.

If its cool, spare prose and flawless narrative design was somehow representative of the Nouveau Roman, largely associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet, it was clear to me that its major difference was that Duras did not distrust emotion. To write The Lover, she drew on her early years living in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon) with her impoverished mother and belligerent brothers. Structured as a kind of memoir, it is about a teenage girl living a peculiar colonial existence in French Indochina in the 1930s with her genteel but “beggar family”.

She decides to make something happen and starts to wear a man’s fedora hat and gold lamé shoes. In so doing, she suddenly sees herself “as another”. It’s a magic trick to separate from her deadening mother, and it works.