ABSTRACT
It is often said that writers have only one story to tell. This is certainly true of Marguerite Duras. Born in French Indochina, Duras returns time and again in her writings to her colonial upbringing, to her troubled family life, and especially to an adolescent love affair with a rich, twenty-seven-year-old Chinese man, the subject of her internationally best-selling novel, L'Amant - translated into English as The Lover. It must not be forgotten that she likewise wields one of the most original styles in contemporary French writing. She experimented constantly with dialogue and narrative structure during the 1960s and 1970s. Duras has often worked in this circular manner, transforming novels into plays and the plays into films, each time revising the plot or, more specifically, the vision with which the plot unfolds. In the process, characters are sometimes developed more fully, new characters are added or minor characters deleted.
