The Sea Wall and The Lover Summary
Marguerite Duras

The Sea Wall and The Lover Summary

The novels The Sea Wall and The Lover are closely related thematically. Both are autobiographical works that draw on Duras's childhood near Saigon in what was then French IndoChina. In both stories, Duras treats social and personal concerns. Her parents had come to the former French colonies as teachers, seeking the promise of adventure and wealth. They found neither, and after the death of her father her mother was left to raise two sons and a daughter with little money. What funds she had were spent to build a wall to protect her property against the annual floods that made the land unfarmable. Crabs destroyed the wall, the flood waters ravaged the fields anew, and Duras's mother gradually fell into madness, haunted by creditors in the corrupt colonial administration. Although the family lived in dire poverty, they were still French colonists, and, as such...

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