M. Thomas's
White Hotel. Articles in such nonliterary magazines as
Vogue, Vanity Fair, and
People also chronicled the event.
L'Amant is the tale of a passionate love affair lived by a young French lycéenne in Saigon with a wealthy young Chinese man during the 1930s. The story is recounted by a sixty-year-old woman ravaged by the pain of life, who, to those familiar with Duras's biography, is not unlike the author herself. L'Amant is indeed representative of most of Duras's fiction, informed as it is by memories of her youth spent in French colonial Indochina, now Vietnam. The experiences of those years marked her emotionally and physically; the first few paragraphs of L'Amant are a description of the narrator's aged face: "J'ai un visage lacéré de rides sèches et profondes, à la peau cassée ... détruit" (My face is lacerated with deep, dry lines and broken skin ... destroyed). These personal scars were to furnish the stuff of her fiction. Her first important novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (translated as The Sea Wall in 1953), is set in the rice paddies of the Mekong River delta. The exotic landscape of Vietnam colors the decor of much of Duras's fiction with a sensual but oftentimes suffocating eroticism either implicit, in novels set in non-Oriental places, such as Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952; translated as The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1966) and Dix Heures et demie du soir en été (1960; translated as Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, 1962), or explicit, as in Le Vice-Consul (1966; translated as The Vice-Consul, 1968) and India Song (1973; translated, 1976).
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