But only three works are wholly rooted in Indochina, The Sea Wall (1950), The Lover and, in 1991, a less successful reworking of The Lover, the The North China Lover.Īt Sa Dec the Mekong River runs very strongly, as it does everywhere in the Delta. From the age of 28 when she wrote her first novel, Les Impudents, until her death in 1996 at the age of 82, she published prolifically, effortlessly traversing literary genre novels, essays, plays, film scripts, journalism, autobiography. ”īefore her eighteenth birthday, Duras left Indochina for France. There’s not the least nostalgia as she writes in The Lover for “those incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp. In her writing there’s no sentiment, nor even cursory affection, for Sa Dec, nor for any of her childhood homes in Indochina. In a sense, it’s appropriate that the Vietnamese don’t make a fuss of Duras. It’s undoubtedly not the first time he’s been asked but he can’t imagine why Westerners are interested in the town’s primary school. He follows my gaze to the house across the river, nods vaguely. “Marg Rite?” repeats the local police captain. But there are no commemorative plaques nor proud signs pointing the way to the one time home of a famous daughter. A steady stream of porters lumps sacks and boxes into the jumble of these crammed premises.īoth the school where Duras’ mother taught and the small house behind it where the family must have lived still stand. Ancient river boats load and unload at the wharves built almost to the shop doors. Warehouses, mostly old Chinese shop-houses, bulge with merchandise. In Sa Dec director Jean-Jaques Annaud shot much of his 1992 film, The Lover with Jane March as the waif-like French fifteen year old with the devastating sense of style and Tony Leung as her rich, elegant Chinese lover.Īside from the fact that the French have long departed, not a lot has changed in Sa Dec since Duras’ day. In its year of publication it won France’s most prestigious literary award, Prix Goncourt.
Published in France in 1984 and in its first English translation in 1985, The Lover has since been translated into more than forty languages.
Here she set much of her autobiographical novel, The Lover.
French writer Marguerite Duras spent some of her childhood in Sa Dec, a sprawling busy town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.
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