1THE LOVER中文名： 玛格丽特杜斯 外文名：MargueriteDuras 国籍：法国 出生日期：1914 年 4 月 4 日逝世日期：1996 年 3 月 3 日职业：女小说家，剧作家，电影艺术 家 主要成就：1983 年法兰西学院戏剧大奖代表作品：麾狄拉特干达毕业Part I ONE DAY, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said:Ive known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young,but I want t o tell you I think youre more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I p erfer your face as it is now. Ravaged. I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which Ive never spoken. Its always there, in the same silence, amazing. Its the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize my self, in which I delight. Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteenand twenty- five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I dont know if its the same for everyone. Ive never asked. But I believe Ive heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when theyre going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread overmy features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest i might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me againtwo years later, at nineteen. And Ive kept it ever 2since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. Its got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. Its scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasnt collapsed, as some with fine features have done. Its kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.THE LOVERPart II So, Im fifteen and a half. Its on a ferry crossing the Mekong river. The image lasts all the way acro ss. Im fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just one season, hot, monotonous, were in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal. Im at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school. My mothers a teacher and wants her girl to have a secondary education. You have to go to high school. What was enough for her is not enough for her daughter. High school and then a good degree in mathematics. That was what had been dinned into me ever since I started school. It never crossed my mind I might escape the mathe- matics degree, I was glad to give her that hope. Every day I saw her planning her own and her childrens future. There came a time when she couldnt plan anything very grand for her sons any more, so she planned other futures, makeshift ones, but they too served their purpose, they blocked in the time that lay ahead. I remember my younger brothers courses in book-keeping. From the Universal Correspondence School - every year, every level. You have to catch up, my mother used to say. It would last for three days, never four. Never. Wed drop the Universal School whenever my mother was posted to another place. And begin again in the next. My mother kept it up for ten years. It wasnt any good. My younger brother became an accountants clerk in Saigon. There was 3no technical school in colonies; we owed my elder brothers departure for France to that. He stayed in France for several years to study at the technical school. But he didnt keep it up. My mother must have known. But she had no choice, he had to be got away from the other two children. For several years he was no longer part of the family. It was while he was away that my mother bought the land, the concession. A terrible business, but for us, the children who were left, not so ter- rible as the presence of the killer who would have been, the child-killer of the night, of the night of the hunter.The Lover-Duras The Lover (French title: LAmant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les ditions de Minuit. It has been translated to 43 languages. It was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt. The Lover is also a 1992 movie based on this novel, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai. The cast also included Lisa Faulkner. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Summary of the movie Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl (Jane March), from a financially strapped French family a