"Like fog, boredom covered Jacques's life, and in this haze, reality faded and became elusive." Similar dislocations and ennui are present in The Lover, with more artful handling by a writer in her prime. Despite the breach of social and racial mores, the family acclimates to the girl's affair because they need her lover's money to settle her oldest brother's debts.īook Reviews Longing, Passion, Philosophy In Revived DurasĪ strange, dislocating passivity infects the characters in The Impudent Ones. The girl comes from a bourgeois family on the decline Papa is dead and Maman struggles to hold together her two older boys and the girl. She meets a nameless older, wealthy Chinese man with whom she has an affair - all sex and no words - that lasts for two years until she returns to France. In that book, a nameless 15-year-old French girl ferries across the Mekong Delta to boarding school in Saigon. To prepare for this review, I reread Duras's bestselling autobiographical novel The Lover, published in 1984 and set in 1930s French Indochina. She won the Prix Goncourt and other praise for novels and screenplays, including Hiroshima Mon Amour, an iconic film directed by Alain Resnais. Haskett.ĭuras was celebrated during her lifetime. Fans of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) may be excited to learn that her debut novel, The Impudent Ones, written in her mid-20s, has received its first English translation by Kelsey L.
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