One of the most beautiful experiences a writer can have is when they feel like they’re seeing their priorities, desires, and hopes for their own writing mirrored in the work of someone else.
When I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras, it was as though I were seeing all of my priorities, desires, and hopes crystallized into an ultra-pure form. It's like The Lover was pure heroin for me. That's probably a terrible metaphor to use; actually it is a terrible metaphor to use. But the explosion of recognition, and sense of permission I felt, when I read that book cannot be understated.
I wanted to understand everything about the book. I made incomprehensible diagrams of the first 20 pages to try to figure out how she wrote them. One of the things Duras does so well not only in The Lover but in many of her books is establish how, in writing, time can become malleable and nonlinear, that it can bend in half then straighten out again, toggle from the past into the future, even within the same sentence. In certain ways, what she does is reflective of things that astrophysicists say about time, namely that it’s a lot less rigid than we realize. In fact, that feels like a really fitting connection to make, between Duras and astrophysics. Because something else Duras does throughout her oeuvre is write about something that seems so established, so taken for granted, so mundane, not worth our time (especially as dictated by a patriarchal society)—like the story of a young girl finding herself, which is a super reductive but for our purposes passable summary of The Lover—and makes it seem totally new, unexpected, strange, unfamiliar. Duras makes the world around us, in all of its simple, unremarkable little details, seem like outer fucking space.
-Eugenie Dalland