I had thought this was the third time I’ve read this book, but maybe only the second, unless I reread it before I started keeping my book lists, which is certainly possible. The first time I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras was in college, during a year-long class on writing the short novel with Jane Alison, whose books I’d only read years later but absolutely love, and is someone with whom I still keep in very distant contact (mostly when she publishes a new book; you should go read Villa E, as it was very, very good).

I don’t remember much of what I thought about it at the time — and I am not feeling brave enough to go back and try to find my notebooks and diaries from that period — but I have reliably recommended the book over and over since. I have read other Duras (though not much, not enough). But this book looms particularly large in my memory — perhaps because that class, the people I wrote and worked with, that particular period of my life, looms so large — and when I think about beautiful, delicate, controlled writing, I think of this book often. And I am working on a project now that hope will be beautiful, delicate, and controlled, and as such it was time to reread The Lover.

How wonderful, heartbreaking, a book to revisit, how many years later.

The thing that I remembered most about the book is its movement, its structure. It works via short sections, often only a paragraph (think stanzas, think crots — though lately it seems like I may have misunderstood the meaning of that term, or rather it may be itself somewhat loose and unfixed), which jump forward, backward, across in time and topic, in mode. There is an "I" and an externalized "she." There is repetition, theme and digression. It’s the kind of thing that makes its own sense and then makes further since once you hear — perhaps apocryphally, now that I can no longer quickly find a reliable source — that it was originally written as a commentary on a number of photographs that were excluded in the final version. It’s rich, visual, and is, I think, poetry.

What struck me this time — aside from the things that would strike someone in their mid-30s rereading something as opposed to what strikes a much younger someone in their early 20s — was the way that this works internally to the sections themselves, specifically in terms of the internal repetition, variation, return.

To wit, opening the book at random:

The parallel structure is a lovely, familiar, powerful device, but then you get the secondary repetition, too, in "any talk" and "any need to talk", of course ending with the variation: "silent, distant."

And then the one that finally stuck out enough to make me realize what was going on, a little over 80 pages in:

It’s astounding, to me, how much work "Blue." does. This is not in a particularly — plot-wise — significant section. It’s in a series of sections that build to significance, but itself? "Blue" punctuates, underscores, emphasizes. It’s a small thing but it’s the hundreds of small things that create the overall effect, the structure. The individual stones that make up the cathedral.

I’ve always been interested in these small devices, these building-blocks, although I think — with finally enough years out of school — that I’m beginning to understand the relationship, their use, a little better (a text I recently sent a friend: "I think I finally understand why you might ever want to rhyme something"). This works so well because of the way that it contributes to, embodies the overall structure of the text and its content (n.b. "Form is the shape of content," Shahn), namely memory, and a kind of obsessive return.

(Aside: I don’t have enough smart to say about this, but speaking of obsession, this book is so delightfully (stereotypically?) mid-century French in its orientation toward death.)

I read something somewhere, once, probably on LitHub, about how — I think it was — Rachel Kushner (whom I haven’t really read) puts together a bookshelf for each book she writes or is working on. I’ve dug up the syllabus for Jane’s class and am going back over the "Required Reading." I seem to remember that there was individual required reading tacked on as well, maybe in the second semester. What were my books, I wonder? I am fairly sure it included The Woman in the Dunes, which I’ve been tempted to but have yet to reread (and will not soon, for it’s doing a different thing than my current project). Maybe also The Reader, though it’s possible that Jane and I discussed that in some other context. In any case, I think it’s still a good idea. I think it’s useful. I found rereading Things recently extremely useful, and I am excited to read what is apparently a very intentional homage in Perfection.

This is all to say that there is so much going on in The Lover that it makes (at least this) one think of, consider, so much more. And I am a fan of anything that sparks further digressions, paths, pursuits. I look forward, very much, to reading it again.