The End of the Car

We’ve had our car for fourteen years, and it was perhaps greedy, but I was hoping to squeeze a couple more years out of it. Enough to get us through the basement disaster and have our accounts recover a bit. But, on Tuesday, we received the news I really did not want to hear. There are some major, major things wrong with our car. Two major parts, and maybe a major system, and we were gently advised that there was no real point fixing anything.

We were on foot the rest of the week, after a trip between dealerships, and it’s been difficult to wrap my head around not being able to drive the car that has served us faithfully for so long. It was the first car that was really ‘our’ car. It was the car that relatives tried to attach tin cans to on our wedding day. I know it’s time to move on, but it’s going to be expensive financially and psychologically.

An Autobiographical Novel

Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (L’Amant) is a short novel (basically a novella) which is based on events in Duras’ own past in French Indochina. In the book, an unnamed woman looks back to her youth. Specifically, to the affair she had with a 27-year-old man when she was just fifteen. Through examining the affair, Duras speaks to racial tensions in the area in the waning decades of colonialist rule. Duras isn’t just reminiscing about herself, but about the world she belonged to that is now gone and the love that didn’t amount to more than memories and gestures nearly forgotten.

The Focus

While the book is called The Lover, I would argue that it’s not much about the lover at all. It’s more about the dysfunctional nature of the narrator’s family, more specifically her mother who is a depressed and malignant influence in the narrator’s life. She is trying to escape family ties. The mother and the only child she cares about — a useless, lying, scheming, violent older brother — are people she is trying to leave behind but never quite manages to. This affair represents her first attempt to do so. That being said, the meaning of the relationship for the narrator changes over time, from something she used for a utilitarian purpose to the love of her life that she let slip through her fingers.

No Longer A Youth

I have now read multiple writers who have claimed The Lover as an essential influence on their life and their subsequent art. However, at least one of these writers also said that whether or not the book reaches you depends on what point in your life you happen to read it. In youth, it supposedly has more of an impact, and maybe that’s partially why I didn’t find it lived up to its reputation.

I also found it hard to get over the fact that the 27-year-old man is not depicted in any way predatory for starting a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl. In fact, the child is depicted as being in control to the extent that it seems that Duras is proposing that as an excuse. Honestly, it felt like the entire novel was trying to justify the statutory rape and ended up romanticizing it. Not good.

I can see that if one was a teenager or someone in their early twenties, it wouldn’t be immediately and glaringly obvious that the narrator is looking back at this relationship with an idealized lens. That there is victimization here. That there is no way it can be equal or non-toxic. An adult reading this book has a much different perspective to bring to the text.

New Car in the Driveway

We get the in a few days and I will be relieved for so many reasons. The main one is that the bullet has been bitten and now I just want the benefit of biting that bullet. The lesser ones involve not listening for weird sounds and smelling weird smells that mean yet another trip to the mechanic. I’m hoping the fact that I can relax and enjoy the ride again will be worth the amount of money we had to pay for the privilege.