LOLITA THE LOVER DURAS FREE

Undaunted, my best friend and I each changed from our travel clothes into provocative summer outfits. Our suitcases bulged with what we had envisioned ourselves strutting around Paris in-halter tops, flimsy sundresses. When we arrived in Paris, however, the skies were gloomy, the temperature chilly. In the terminal at JFK, we bought cigarettes, lighters, and condoms. I might not be wearing gold heels and a fedora on a ferry crossing the Mekong, but we would arrive in Paris in June I could wear a tight skirt and high, strappy sandals and, with luck, meet an alluring Frenchman. Behind closed bedroom doors, we prepared for the sexual adventures we felt sure would arise from being sixteen, largely unsupervised, and in Europe, where the liberties of drinking and sex abounded. I worked and saved up for months, my best friend and I having convinced our parents of the worthiness of visiting Versailles and Windsor Castle. I had my chance the summer before senior year, when my high school offered a trip to France and England. I was determined that my own induction into the world of sex would contain the exotic and the forbidden, whenever that time came. But the faint hint of pedophilia, of prostitution, fell so far into the background that it became practically invisible to me then, obscured by the striking imagery and strange, lush atmosphere of colonial Saigon. She is fixated on this particular, outlandish ensemble, as stubborn as a child playing dress up. I donвЂ™t like myself in any others, and to this day I still like myself in them.вЂќ It is the day she is about to meet the вЂњChinamanвЂќ for the first time. My favorite section was where the narrator describes herself on the ferry, wearing gold lamГ© high heels and a manвЂ™s fedora: вЂњGoing to school in evening shoes decorated with little diamantГ© flowers. Just what was The LoverвЂ™s appeal? By then I had discovered Lady ChatterlyвЂ™s Lover and Lolita, but DurasвЂ™s novel resonated more acutely, an exotic Lolita tale but told from the womanвЂ™s (if she could be called that) point of view. I read the book and watched the film again and again.

I was also fifteen and a half, a virgin consumed with the mysteries of sex, of forbidden encounters. вЂњThere are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, weвЂ™re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.вЂќ Nothing suggested sex as much as sensual lyricism, warm, distant places, and anything French. вЂњIвЂ™m fifteen and a half,вЂќ the unnamed narrator repeats early in the book. Soon after, I got my hands on a paperback with a cinema-still cover and was not disappointed. The girlвЂ™s family is crass and impoverished, but she is a good student and wants to be a writer.

LOLITA THE LOVER DURAS FREE

The first Saturday I could secure a house free of hovering parents, my fellow honors English friends and I, as sex obsessed as we were lit geeks, watched, enraptured, Marguerite DurasвЂ™s autobiographical depiction of an adolescent girl in French Indochina who embarks on an affair with a wealthy Chinese man. I had stumbled across a review of the film The Lover and ordered a VHS copy through my movie-of-the-month club.

The slim novel came my way quite by accident. By Vanessa Blakeslee FebruDepartment of Sex Ed

Lolita the lover duras