A review by zmorgason
The Vice Consul by Marguerite Duras

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.0

Lives washed up, coated in the muck of the Ganges. Waiting out their days, burning their lives away by night. Duras' incantatory stream of prose is undeniably hypnotic, even if her 1975 film adaptation would eventually bring the material to an even higher level by introducing the elements of sound and the passage of time. As a fan of India Song, what I most got out of this was the deeper, although somewhat unreliable, backstory for the mad beggarwoman of  Savannakhet, whose peculiar odyssey parallels that of Anne-Marie Stretter. One lives a life of continuous burden, the other of idleness and privilege, la vie tranquille, but they are bound together, unmoored, and drifting far away from their fading memories of home.