Extract

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.

A fifteen-year-old French girl crosses the Mekong on a ferry in 1930s Indochina, and a wealthy Chinese man in a black limousine watches her from the deck. Marguerite Duras returned to this scene from her own adolescence again and again, but in this 1984 novel she found its purest form: a slim, incantatory narrative that circles obsessively around desire, poverty, colonial power, and the wreckage of a family held together by nothing but shame. The prose is stripped to its nerves, each sentence a bare room in which enormous feeling reverberates. Memory does not unfold chronologically here; it arrives in waves, insistent and fragmented. It is a book about what the skin remembers when the mind has tried to forget.