Her chins wobble she teeters back and forward. Why have I come to the Mekong Delta? When will I go back to Ho Chi Minh City? She roars with laughter. In a market alcove I buy iced water from an enormous woman in a faded cotton shift. But for Europeans, the climate is punishing. Even those engaged in the heaviest work, of lugging market produce or rowing laden boats across the river, never seem to sweat. The Vietnamese donвЂ™t seem to notice the temperature. In the surrounding flatness stretching as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as if the earth sloped downwards. My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of the ocean. Rafts of water hyacinth sail by on their way to the South China Sea: But only three works are wholly rooted in Indochina, The Sea Wall (1950), The Lover and, in 1991, a less successful reworking of The Lover, the The North China Lover.ДЄt Sa Dec the Mekong River runs very strongly, as it does everywhere in the Delta. From the age of 28 when she wrote her first novel, Les Impudents, until her death in 1996 at the age of 82, she published prolifically, effortlessly traversing literary genre novels, essays, plays, film scripts, journalism, autobiography. вЂќД«efore her eighteenth birthday, Duras left Indochina for France. ThereвЂ™s not the least nostalgia as she writes in The Lover for вЂњthose incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp. In her writing thereвЂ™s no sentiment, nor even cursory affection, for Sa Dec, nor for any of her childhood homes in Indochina. In a sense, itвЂ™s appropriate that the Vietnamese donвЂ™t make a fuss of Duras. ItвЂ™s undoubtedly not the first time heвЂ™s been asked but he canвЂ™t imagine why Westerners are interested in the townвЂ™s primary school. He follows my gaze to the house across the river, nods vaguely. вЂњMarg Rite?вЂќ repeats the local police captain. But there are no commemorative plaques nor proud signs pointing the way to the one time home of a famous daughter. A steady stream of porters lumps sacks and boxes into the jumble of these crammed premises.Д«oth the school where DurasвЂ™ mother taught and the small house behind it where the family must have lived still stand.

Ancient river boats load and unload at the wharves built almost to the shop doors. Warehouses, mostly old Chinese shop-houses, bulge with merchandise. 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 style and Tony Leung as her rich, elegant Chinese lover.ДЄside from the fact that the French have long departed, not a lot has changed in Sa Dec since DurasвЂ™ day. In its year of publication it won FranceвЂ™s most prestigious literary award, Prix Goncourt. Published in France in 1984 and in its first English translation in 1985, The Lover has since been translated into more than forty languages. Here she set much of her autobiographical novel, The Lover. French writer Marguerite Duras spent some of her childhood in Sa Dec, a sprawling busy town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.

Marguerite duras the war plot