The Lover
Louise FiliAccording to marketing wisdom, the book
jacket designed by Louise Fili (b. 1951 ) for
The Lover by Marguerite Duras could never
propel the book to the bestseller list. The
vignetted portrait of a young woman set
against a soft-hued background and titled
with delicate typography that casts a gentle
shadow was bound to fail the rule that a
jacket must strike the viewer’s eye from a
bookshelf ten feet away.
But The Lover, Duras’s memoir of
being a fifteen-year-old French schoolgirl
who becomes the lover of a Chinese financier
in prewar Indochina, did become a bestseller.
Tales of forbidden sexuality may be
commercially appealing, but Duras’s story,
like its jacket, is subtle and more complicated
than it appears. It is filled with
contradictions. She recalls the past with
knowledge of the future, creating a tableau of
memories superimposed one on another like
double-exposed film. The prose is spare and unerotic, yet the words trigger
imaginative pictures of this girl-woman who at fifteen struggles with sexual
awakening amid cultural and familial taboos.
For the jacket, Fili chose a deceptively simple composition that
characterized the writer’s mix of the intangible and the real. The
photograph was of the author at precisely her age in the memoir. Although
the head-on pose is direct and engages the viewer, Duras’s half-smile is
enigmatic and elusive. The jacket’s muted tones and feathered background
added emotional subjectivity to the photograph’s apparent objectivity. The
thin-stroke typography complemented the spareness of the composition,
but its shadow suggested weight and presence. Published by Pantheon in
1985 ,The Lover’s success was a vindication of Fili’s artful style, which
marketing people often criticized as too low key to be commercially viable.
Readable or not at ten feet, it stood out because of its understated
countenance, not in spite of it.376