Marguerite Duras; French Novelist Wrote ‘The Lover’

PARIS —  Marguerite Duras, one of France’s most famed and prolific writers, who became best known in recent years for her novel “The Lover” and the film based on it, died Sunday. She was 81.

Duras, whose literary career spanned 50 years and 35 novels, died at her home in the Latin Quarter, according to parish authorities there.

“She considered herself to be the best writer of the French language, and nothing irritated her more than to be told maybe she was the second,” said Duras’ friend Francoise Giroud, a fellow writer and a former minister of culture.

In an interview with LCI television broadcast here Sunday, Duras said of herself, “Even when I write a complaint letter to the telephone company, I write. I can’t help it. I write all the time. Literature is scandalous, because it is rare and it makes people crazy.”

She was born in what was French Indochina, where her father was a mathematics professor. She went to high school in Saigon, a region that inspired several of her novels, including “L’Amant” (“The Lover”).

The 1984 book, which won France’s top literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, is a moving and sensuous story about a 14-year-old girl from a poor French family in Indochina who becomes the mistress of a wealthy Indochinese notable’s son. The story is vaguely autobiographical; Duras as a young woman in Indochina also had an Asian lover.

The novel portrays the ugliness of colonialism; despite their poverty and marginal status, the girl’s family is contemptuous of her wealthy, refined lover because he’s Asian.

The film version was widely successful in France and abroad.

“ ‘The Lover’ wasn’t her best book, but it’s the one that made her known to the general public and gave her notoriety and money,” Giroud said.

Duras also directed 15 films, including “The Children” and “India Song,” which won France’s Cinema Academy Grand Prix. She wrote the screenplay for “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and directed several plays, including some based on her novels.

After high school, Duras left Indochina to study law in Paris. Once she had passed her law degree, she worked as a secretary in France’s Ministry of Colonies from 1935 to 1941.

Between 1943 and 1995, she wrote 35 novels, among the more notable of which were “The Kidnapping of Lol V. Stein” and “Savannah Bay.”

Her 1950 novel “Dam Against the Pacific” is based on her own family’s struggles with the seasonal flooding of the Mekong River.

Duras is survived by a son.