In the early 1980s, Marguerite Duras began her writing day with an emptied-out stomach.

She’d dictate one line to her companion, Yann Andrea, and she’d follow it with two glasses of wine, and a vomit. It was only after this that she was able to hold onto her third glass, and a potential next sentence. From this sentence onwards, she’d continue drinking and writing, accruing nine more litres of wine – supposedly.

I don’t know when I first learnt about Marguerite Duras, but once I did, I couldn’t forget her or this image of her day.

Somehow, Yann, her assistant and acolyte, feeding her aged, alcoholic lips more wine in their solitary chateau became for me an indelible image of a strange morning.

It was that part of the morning commute where the only other passengers on the train were bankers and construction workers.

The tunnels were dark, but the daylight titled towards summer. The expanse of suburban brush blurred in the organic spill of sun, and I looked at the same landscape that I had seen disappear at various speeds for years.

He got on four stops into the journey. A man who sat down in the opposite corner of the block of seats, his face visible to me through the gap in the headrests. A glance, brief, but then another, and again. I looked at him as much as I’d allow myself to look at strangers. It was easy because he was good looking, but that wasn’t the reason for my glances.

His face was made up of a strong jaw, stubble, and the flexion of not-quite young skin across heavy eyebags. He wore a starched white shirt and a woollen blue suit. He was the kind of man who smelt of imposing colognes and carried with him the accessories of his profession; a Fred Perry leather holdall, a folded mackintosh coat, the phones he jostled between hands.

I had looked at this landscape enough times to know where we were without looking. In my glance at the seated man, there was a question; do I know you? I do know you, right?

He didn’t answer, because he did the usual things that people do on such journeys; distract themselves.

His eyes were weary, weighed down by the bruising of exhaustion. He looked young but also very old. Haggard. He resembled other men who I regularly saw on this route who looked like they were contented with a diet of Red Bull and cocaine.

My phone allowed me to seem more polite than I was. I looked down and hid my recognition.

After the success of The Lover, Duras apparently said “The Lover is a load of shit…It’s an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.”

When I first read of her dismissal of her own work, I felt told off. She had told me that I had bad taste. She had said that I was one of those unsubtle women who loved airport novels and was easily romanced.

To defend myself, I searched the internet. I found an article where a critic quoted a critic, who said that The Lover “feels like actually being in a room with someone after three glasses of wine”, intending to allude to the liveliness and vulnerability of the prose.

When I read the critic’s effusion, I was reminded of something that someone had told me about their mother; her favourite drink was white wine, which she called Lady Poison. Also about the fact that no one remarks on Hemingway’s drunkenness in connection to his style, or that saying few words in staccato sentences is a reasonable strategy for convincing people that you are sober when not.

There are many words that I could say about Marguerite Duras’s The Lover but the thing that will probably be the least spoken of and the most unexpected is what Duras said about ageing. That it can happen in a moment of recognition.

The book begins as though it were a fairy tale, but with a stranger’s accosting:

“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.”

Already an odd sentence, with its clauses of split logic, the paragraph ends with a come-on whose appeal derives from its disregard to romantic type:

“He introduced himself and said: ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’”

Over the next few pages, and throughout the narrative, this “ravaged” face hovers, particularly this word and its imposing devastation.

It is this entropy of a face that drives the narrative, with the mystery of the implied question, ‘But what happened to her to cause this destruction?’

The man on the train couldn’t tell me I looked old because I don’t think he recognised me. Anyway, I knew we were the same age.

How did I know this?

While sitting in his suit, it happened, when he let his tongue dart from his face, the left joust of the fleshy muscle hanging between his lips.

It was then that I confirmed my recognition. Remembered his name.

I flashed back to the primary school classroom where twenty or so years ago we had been peers, and I had sat, as a small girl, scrutinising the face of a boy who liked to stick out his tongue at such a strange, extroverted angle that he looked like an insect probing for bacteria in the air.

Mainly, he would hang it outside his face while he was in the depths of concentration. Also, I think when stressed. Even then, I thought it was a babyish gesture. A word that I didn’t know at the time - ‘self-soothing’ - a loss of motor control that was an outcome of the overexertion of will.

Overlaid the haggard man-face was the memory of the young boy who also seemed to hide underneath the strain of the adult visage. Boy, man, adult, child, exhausted, innocent; bereft by life experience.

Over and underneath these contrasts, a distinct amount of time unified in the gesture of the stuck-out tongue.

I tried not to keep on looking, especially after the thrill of exercising my memory had declined. I avoided seeing if it was still there. It being narrative, not the tongue; narrative imposed on the present.

I scrutinised him less and less, because I had seen enough.

He obviously had an important job. He looked very wealthy. He possessed the authority of men. And yet, in the ravaged face, I wondered how it was possible that even in all the regalia of adulthood he had maintained this gesture?

How had he not lost the tongue’s joust, yet?

And was I the same?

With my own vestiges of the babyish, proof of the devastation of age?

Often when I read articles or blurbs about books I have read, I feel deceived or disappointed. They are so insubstantial; they may as well be a lie. The blurb author seems to focus on the wrong part of the book’s plot and finds emphases that I saw as less necessary and less total than what the book’s author had intended.

A not so egregious example:

“Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man.”

As accurate as this simple blurb is, what does it tell you about the cause of the ‘ravaged’ face that is the book’s most important question?

Blurbs feel like bad faith because they are summation. I could say, The Lover is a book about…and I would have to say it hundreds of times to encapsulate the experience of its reading.

I could say The Lover is a book about a love affair between a young girl in her appropriated childhood home of Vietnam with an older Chinese businessman, but in a way that would negate the other version, which is also true, that says The Lover is about a young girl’s grief after the death of her younger brother, for which she blames her older brother.

But in my own personal formulation for this book, The Lover is a book about the devastation of age wrought through experience. About how poverty, desire, violence and power can happen suddenly on a face:

“Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone. I’ve never asked. But I believe I’ve heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they’re going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden.”

Everything that happens to this girl is encapsulated in a single instance of time. Time accelerates inside the body, on its surface, like a shock. The shock is entropic, and yet not only that:

“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.”

This sentence is not Duras’ best prose, and yet it is the line that moves towards an accuracy of summation. The narrator looks upon her life’s devastation and its recognition in her face, and instead of upset, she experiences it with neutral regard. The Lover is a book about reading a face like a book.

A book that disregards the continuities of time, where tenses slip, present brushing up against past, future intertwining the two, and even the unity of the first-person narrator crumbles into an outside third. Language, grammar, story; all are ravaged, and yet this destruction is not so terrible upon recognition; because back in the beginning, it had already happened:

“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.”

For much of the journey, I wondered if he recognised me. It seemed possible, though I told myself I looked too different than when at school.

The last time I had seen him was over ten years ago. I had heard about his marriage to a girl in our school year, and how he was the first of the married to get divorced.

The man on the train was a kind of pioneer. The original divorcee. A renegade of those who had tried to fulfil the conservative dream; a dream which was so distinct from what I had done in over a decade there was no point in making a comparison. If he had looked at me with recognition, I guessed he would have seen this.

But I was the one looking. And I should have trusted my eyes, and yet, I wanted more detail.

The internet facilitates answers to unutterable questions, questions like ‘what happened to his face?’ I typed the name I remembered into Google, and added the additional search term, ‘LinkedIn’.

The first result was a portrait of his face, which was accurate in as much as it described his current features. Beneath this image, there was a list of important banks where he had worked.

He was a manager of some department of presumed importance, presumed because I don’t have the kinds of referents to assess the subtle degrees of his standing, but just enough to establish its basic premise.

The internet said many things, and yet, all it really underscored was what I already knew. I closed my phone and hoped that the comparisons between what he had achieved and lost, and I had achieved and lost that crowded my mind, would disappear.

I told myself that he looked awful.

I told myself that age happened across his face, not mine.

That age happens on a person at different speeds.

But it had happened to him, and in my recognition of it, it had happened to me. His face had confirmed it.

But his face wasn’t to blame, because my face, all faces, like Duras’s, have some facet of their features which have been prepared for this:

“Now that I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me…Just as the space existed in me for desire….That was how everything started for me – with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings round the eyes, in advance of time and experience.”

The man got off the stop before me - in advance of time - disappearing presumably into the city’s big-boy streets.

A stop later, on the bridge in the cracked-open morning, I tried not to think, not to see what had already been foretold.

But the effort was for nothing. In the light of morning, I was too distracted by the revelation that, all of a sudden, I was ancient. All of a sudden, I was ravaged. All of a sudden, there was life, and…I, unlike Duras’s sanguinity, was a little outraged, and demanded to know from vastness how no one had told this near-stranger to stop sticking his tongue out like that?