It's a long time since I've added anything to my Viet Nam series, and this one represents a very different viewpoint from previous entries.

Marguerite Duras (you pronounce the "s", which I found out only recently) was born Marguerite Donnadieu near Saigon in 1914. She spent most of her youth in what is now Viet Nam, leaving for Paris only in 1932 to go to university. She died in 1996.

She wrote L'amant in 1984 (the English translation, its title sensibly rendered, for once, as The Lover, came out the following year). So she was 70 when she wrote it. It was her 48th work, in a career that encompassed not only writing (books, articles, and screenplays), but also producing and directing films. This was the one, however, that had the greatest international impact, and it won her the Prix Goncourt in 1992.

The book describes a relationship between a 15-year-old girl from a poverty-stricken French colonial family in Indochina, and a rich, 27-year-old Chinese financier based in Saigon. Both remain unnamed, and the story plays out in the period Duras lived there. According to Rachel Kushner, "The Lover ... was received as disclosure... Readers were eager to wade into a steamy vision of a colonial childhood and to presume it was her life... Later, Duras said the depiction in The Lover was her actual childhood, but those who knew her best suggest she had begun to confuse her fiction with reality... Even Alain Vircondelet, the most credulous of her three biographers, calls the story a legend she invented, which, 'having ripened during her whole life, finally became true'..."

So here we are, back at that whole true/untrue thing... See here for a fuller discussion.


Viet Nam, 2003

It's a frustrating book, in some ways. It jumps around, it circles back. Subject pronouns shift. It's almost impossible to extract from it a chronological account. And there is a strange nebulousness about it. This latter quality is frequently mentioned by critics, who refer, for example, to an "elliptical, dreamlike tone", a "dreamy vagueness". Not everyone is a fan: "If the book, at just over a hundred pages, reads like the hazy, disconnected musings of a seventy-year-old writer looking at faded snapshots of her past, that's because it is..."

Even Duras, perhaps, was not entirely convinced: "Laure Adler, in her unauthorized biography ... writes that the author had harsh words for it, international acclaim or no. 'The Lover is a load of shit,' she told [Jean-Jacques] Annaud when the two were collaborating on the film adaptation. 'It's an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.'"

And yet, surely that must be one of those self-deprecating things that we say sometimes, and kind of hope no-one's around to record. Because other sources show a satisfaction with what she achieved. In an interview with Bernard Pivot, the year the book was published, she talks about having finally achieved the style she wanted, which she called "l'ecriture courante" (writing that flows or runs): "What I mean by l'ecriture courante is a distracted kind of writing, which runs, which is more in a hurry to catch things than to say them, you see, and I'm talking about the crest of words, it's a writing that progresses quickly on the crest, in order to go quickly, so as not to lose -- because when you write, this is the tragedy, you forget everything right away, and it's dreadful sometimes." In another discussion she says that l'ecriture courante is the kind of writing that doesn't show itself, that doesn't insist, that hardly has the time to exist.

Which makes it interesting French to read, although -- as I said -- it is not without its exasperating qualities.

Despite the title, the least interesting aspect is the story of the physical and monetary relationship (it's little else) between the young girl and the Chinese man. She is too young, of course (and he lives in fear of the consequences of this), but she is proactive, and she enjoys the relationship. By the end, when they're due to part (because his father won't contemplate their marriage, and she is leaving to study anyway), the relationship takes on somewhat queasy tones: "I had become his child. It was with his child that he made love every evening." But on the boat back to France, she wonders whether she had, after all, actually loved him. And the book closes with an account of a phone call he made to her after the war, in which he tells her he still loves her, could never stop loving her, would love her until he died... But, to be honest, you don't care that much...



On the other hand, there are three aspects of the book that I really enjoyed.

Firstly, it is awash with atmosphere, which (largely) avoids sentimental or orientalist overtones.

As this 1985 interview explained: "[Duras] belongs to no one and still considers herself a Creole, a Frenchwoman born outside France. 'All my books come from that,' she says. 'I am very glad to be born elsewhere.'" And it shows. Writing all those years later, she remembers the power of the Mekong, bearing all before it: "My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea."

She masterfully evokes the heat, the light, the haze of Viet Nam; the noises that come into the room at Cholon used by the lovers, and the different smells: toasted peanuts, roasted meats, jasmine, incense, charcoal...



Secondly, while Duras's novel does not offer a critique of colonialism, it certainly provides a sharp and not particularly flattering commentary on colonial society.

As Catherine Lacey comments: "The book is much more about power than love... It's about what happens during these moments of exchanges of power, between the lovers, between cultures, between family." A lot of that power exchange has a colonial backdrop.

The mother of the family, widowed with three dependent children, has been cheated out of her life savings by the colonial authorities. Lacking the wherewithal to grease the right palms, she was sold unworkable land, which constantly floods. The family, then, always struggles with poverty. Duras makes it clear that they are white-poor. So they don't go hungry. They are humiliated, they are forced to sell furniture and eat unusual things, but they don't go hungry. Nevertheless, the financial difficulties contribute to the mother's increasing mental instability, and feed into the girl's relationship with the Chinese lover.

The mother seems to have the belief that her daughter will be able to bring money into the household. That's why, says the girl, she permits her to catch the ferry in her racy outfit -- "the attire of a child prostitute" -- which consists of a semi-transparent dress, gold lame shoes, and ostentatious man's hat. The mother does, it seems, passively prostitute her: "The child knows that what she is doing is what her mother would would have chosen her child to do if she had dared..."

The girl's family don't speak to the Chinese lover, even though they eat the dinner to which he invites them. But then they don't speak to each other either: "We are on the margins of this society that has reduced my mother to despair. Because of what has been done to our kind, trusting mother, we hate life, and we hate each other."

And there is a film of hypocrisy to be maintained: The mother asks the school to allow her daughter to come and go as she wishes in the evening, but she pretends to know nothing of what is really happening. Eventually, she fears that her daughter is making herself unmarriageable. Encouraged by the vicious elder brother, she abuses the girl, verbally and physically.

More generally, sexuality is never far below the surface. When the young Chinese man first looks at the girl on the ferry crossing the Mekong, we are told that she's already used to being looked at. For three years white men have been looking at her in the streets, and her mother's friends have been asking her to tea when their wives are playing tennis at the Sports Club...

Colonial women exist in a kind of limbo: "They don't do anything, they just save themselves, save themselves for Europe, their lovers, their holidays in Italy, the six-month long-service leave every three years, when they will finally talk about what happens here, about this colonial existence that is so peculiar." Some of them go crazy. Some commit suicide.

Even much later, however, Duras will not roundly condemn colonialism. Her mother, a teacher, was generous and benevolent, which is why she says she is "a little reticent when people talk to me about certain aspects of colonialism. The teachers were truly passionate public servants, who killed themselves working and who had miserable salaries, the most miserable of all, the same salaries as customs officials, postal workers." Well, yes, but...



Thirdly, Duras's depiction of familial relationships is fascinating.

The girl in the story has two brothers, both older than she is.

There's the violent, feckless older one, the mother's favourite (she refers to him as "my child"; the other two are "the younger ones"). He bullies all around him, but particularly terrorizes the younger brother.

That younger one is vulnerable (it's not really made clear in the novel, but other work indicates he was to some extent intellectually challenged); he is also much loved by his sister. He dies in 1942, and the way she mourns him is eloquent and affecting: "People should be warned about these things. They should be told that immortality is mortal, that it can die, that this has happened before, that it is still happening... That life is immortal only while it is being lived, while it is alive..."

And then there is that mother... Unsurprisingly, given her financial struggles, she is ambitious for her children's future. But she is uncompromising in her ideas of what that might involve. When the daughter tells her she wants to write, the mother insists that a maths degree must come first. Her daughter comes top in French at school, but mother is not happy -- firstly because it's not her sons who are top in French, and secondly because all she is interested in is mathematics... For the mother what's needed "is not to arrive somewhere, but to get out of where you are".

Again unsurprisingly, the mother frequently seems prey to depression, often too tired even to dress and feed the children: "This great discouragement with living, my mother went through it every day... I was lucky enough to have a mother who was desperate with a despair so pure that even the happiness of life, however bright, sometimes did not succeed in distracting her from it completely... It was every day. Of that I am sure. It must have been brutal. At a given moment of every day this despair would show itself, to be followed sometimes by exhaustion, sometimes by a wild desire to buy things."

So the girl loves her mother, but hates her too.

And eventually she comes to understand that her mother is mentally ill.

Duras elaborates on this in an essay from 1988 that forms part of a collection published in 2019. Some excerpts:

"I've written so much about my mother. I can say that I owe her everything. In my everyday life, I don't do anything that she didn't do...

"My mother, though she loved us, was never affectionate...

"Although she was a teacher, my mother didn't read... Only textbooks were worth something to my mother, who didn't like when I read. She would yell, she would say that if we were reading then we weren't working...

"I believe that I loved my mother more than anything, and that it came undone all at once... She loved her eldest son the way one loves a boyfriend, a man...

"She would beat me...

"Today, my mother, I don't love her anymore... At the end of her life, she was as detached from me as I was from her...

"If I express care, emotion, when I talk about her, it's because I think about the injustice she suffered as well as the injustice she perpetrated. The image I have of her is not a very good image, is not a very clear image. I see her again preventing me from kissing her, pushing me away with her hand: 'Leave me alone...'...

"I wrote that my mother represented madness... In the end, I think motherhood makes you obscene..."

So, it's a very dark book, at the end of the day, full of secrets and unseen influences and hidden connections.

As Leslie Garis wrote of Duras, "Fear, despair, alienation are themes that seized her in her childhood... [A] mix of eroticism and death runs through her work like a river that feeds everything it passes."