Marguerite Duras In Sa Dec

by Pamela Payne
French writer Marguerite Duras spent some of her childhood in Sa Dec, a sprawling busy town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Here she set much of her autobiographical novel, The Lover. Published in France in 1984 and in its first English translation in 1985, The Lover  has since been translated into more than forty languages. In its year of publication it won France's most prestigious literary award, Prix Goncourt.
In Sa Dec director Jean-Jaques Annaud shot much of his 1992 film, The Lover with Jane March as the waif-like French fifteen year old with the devastating sense of sty...