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This dramatic, intense memories of an aging Frenchwoman, with emphasis on her teens, unfolds during the 1920s and -30s in the French colony of Indo-China (today’s Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia). Father, a colonial official died when she was a toddler and she grew up in a family from hell, headed by a mother who does everything wrong. Her dissolute, useless elder son is her favorite and terrorizes her younger son and daughter. An autistic family. Both the elder brother and mother beat up the younger siblings in a context of deepening poverty. Because of mother’s terrible investments. Because of her firstborn, who steals even from the servants.

On a ferry across the Mekong river, the then teenage narrator is invited by a 27-years old Chinese millionaire, to be driven to her boarding school in his large, black, chauffeur-driven car. The white and skinny 15½-year old, weirdly-dressed girl and the Chinese man begin an affair. He is obsessed by her, but his father long ago arranged his marriage. She does not love him, but has vague hopes their affair will open a window of opportunity. She has willfully done something the ruling whites in the colony disapprove of. At school, it isolates her more than ever before. Her aim? Who knows? Fleeing from that mad mother and awful brother, the heat, the hopeless poverty to some quiet, secure place to write about her ordeal, then, maybe about new adventures?

Marguérite Duras (1914-96) was a novelist, scriptwriter, playwright and film director. She wrote about love and death and their opposites. This version became a successful movie in 1992, despite a conflict between Duras and its makers: shortly before its première, she published “The North China Lover”, another version.

Grand, small novel full of deep anger. Duras was so troubled, so speechless with disgust about her youth, that it took her several efforts to put it on paper. Has to be read more than once.