The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1984)

It begins with a stranger who tells her, decades later, that he finds her ravaged face more beautiful than the one she wore as a girl. From that astonishing remark Marguerite Duras circles back to the Mekong, to the ferry from Sadec, where at fifteen and a half she stood in a man's flat-brimmed fedora and gold lamé heels and let a wealthy Chinese man step from his black limousine to look at her. What follows is the affair, told in fragments that retreat and return, the narrator slipping between the first person and the third as if she cannot decide whether the girl is herself or someone she once watched from across the years. The family is poor and half-mad, the love is real and impossible, and Duras refuses to pretend the girl was only its victim: she knows exactly what she wants. The prose does not reconstruct desire so much as keep it burning. To remember, here, is to want again.