Duras is a name whose resonance perhaps surpasses the knowledge of her work in the Anglo-Saxon world. I had an extremely vague memory of having read her most famous novel about thirty years ago, but if this was the case, few memories remained. The novel is a strange hybrid, reminiscent in many ways of the writing of Annie Ernaux. A feminine frankness married to a deliberate flouting of narrative norms. The story roams from point to point, at times a fictionalised account of a love affair in French Indochina between a rich Chinese man and a poor French teenager, at other times a family narrative, describing the trials of the narrator’s experiences in the colonies and her turbulent relationship with her mother and her brothers. In general told in the first person, the writer has no qualms suddenly switching to the third person if she wants to change the framing. The result is easily digestible, on the edge of salacious, and incontrovertibly auto-fiction. The writer as subject, the doyenne of her story. With scope to lie and elaborate, no doubt, as a cursory read-up around the novel reveals. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the novel from this reader’s point of view is the description of the torpid world of the colonialist. Never capable of integrating into the society they inhabit, seeking to construct some kind of false entity which represents a homeland but which can never become one. As such the colonial project always seemingly doomed to failure and, more than that, a form of existential despair, an eternal failure to connect. The mother’s depression, the older brother’s psychosis, the treatment of the Chinese lover and his own neuroses, all seem to reveal the hollow foolishness of this imperial reach, one which comes at a cost to all involved.
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