India Song

Name: India Song
ISBN: 9787532765966

Marguerite Duras / 王东亮Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaFeb 2019

3.7

Word count: 34K words
Chapters: 9
ISBN: 9787532765966

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Summary

Written by Marguerite Duras, India Song is the most successful film of her directing career and, like Hiroshima mon amour, one of her international calling cards. This book is the screenplay of the film; published in 1973, it was shot by Duras two years later under the same title. The film was selected for that year's Cannes Film Festival and won the French Experimental Art Cinema Association Award and the Cinema Academy Grand Prize. The story revolves around Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of the French ambassador to India, and three figures around her—her lover Michael Richardson, the vice-consul obsessed with her, and a beggar woman whose life runs parallel to hers. The beggar woman has followed Anne from France's colonies in Southeast Asia; the vice-consul, after his open obsession with her is rebuffed, descends into madness, firing at lepers, dogs, and himself. At the end of her life Duras said that India Song was her only film. "India Song shows nothing but myself. Not a word of it is wrong." This film is both the author's cinematic work and her poetic work. It bewitched the entire festival, I know. If it had been in competition, we would without doubt have awarded it the Palme d'Or.

Editor's review

India Song is a highly representative work from the middle period of Marguerite Duras's career. Far from a novel or screenplay in the traditional sense, it is an "audiovisual score" built out of words. Centered on Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of the French ambassador to India, the book depicts a hot, languid, dying world of colonial society in 1930s Calcutta. With her signature fragmentary narration, recurring and varying melodies, and extremely restrained plain description, Duras constructs a multilayered space made of sound (dialogue, ambient noise, voice-over narration), images (the Ganges, leprosy, heat, the monsoon), and silence. What readers encounter is not a linear plot but a diffused atmosphere, a lingering mood, and the state of existence of characters hollowed out by desire and despair. For readers familiar with Duras's The Lover, this book is a purer and more extreme expression of her artistic method: it strips away the "shell" of story entirely and points straight at the "core" of emotion and memory. Reading this book is a challenge to one's way of perceiving; it asks readers to give up the search for a complete story and instead "listen" with their ears to the silence between the words, "feel" with their skin the scorching heat between the lines, and finally sink with the characters into that sumptuous and desperate languor. Its literary value lies in its expansion of the boundaries of narrative art; it is a great experiment in making the novel poetic, musical, and cinematic.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Sophisticated readers with a strong interest in experimental literature and narrative innovation
Scholars and devoted fans of Duras's work who wish to explore her creative lineage
Readers who prefer to immerse themselves in atmosphere, imagery, and mood rather than plot-driven narratives
Readers who think philosophically about colonial history, Orientalist imagination, and the predicaments of human existence

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a clear, complete story with traditional setup, development, and resolution
Readers new to Duras who would prefer to start with her most accessible work (such as The Lover)

Reading tips

Read as you would listen to music or watch a painting that keeps shifting in tone, attending to the rhythm of the language, the recurrence of images, and the overall atmosphere
Try reading quickly through once to grasp the overall feel, then read a second time to savor passages that seem repetitive yet contain subtle differences
While reading, you may wish to relate the text to Duras's films (such as the film India Song) and sense how techniques like the separation of sound and image are anticipated and transformed in the text

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

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FAQ

What is the relationship between this book and Duras's famous The Lover?

The two were written in roughly the same period and share some colonial settings and emotional tones (such as desire, despair, and an exotic atmosphere), but their artistic methods are very different. The Lover has a relatively clear narrative thread of reminiscence, whereas India Song is thoroughly fragmented and musical—a more radical work of formal experiment by Duras.

The plot is thin and I find it hard to get into the book. What should I do?

This is a common first reading experience. Try adjusting your expectations: the core of this book is not "plot" but "state" and "atmosphere." You can treat it as a long prose poem or a literary symphony, giving up on tracking "what happened" and instead feeling "what it is like"—that sense of existence woven from heat, languor, waiting, and dissolution.

Is the "India" in the book the real India?

It is less the geographically or historically real India than a literary image projected from Duras's inner world—a stage setting that carries the colonizer's desire, weariness, guilt, and ultimate solitude. It is a highly aestheticized, symbolized "other" space, an externalization of the characters' inner worlds. Understanding this is one of the keys to entering Duras's literary world.

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About the author

Marguerite Duras Author · France · 1914–1996

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter and film director, born Marguerite Donnadieu in Gia Định, French Indochina, and died in Paris in 1996. She first gained recognition with The Sea Wall in 1950 and achieved international fame with her screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour in 1959; in 1984 her novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt. Her writing often explores colonial upbringing, love and desire, memory and loss, in a spare, musical prose. The collection holds 58 of her works, including novels, plays and essays, commonly classified under foreign literature and classics, and she is regarded as a major figure in the French New Novel and feminist writing.

王东亮 Author

Wang Dongliang is a Chinese book author about whom limited public information is available; his biography and identity have not been widely disclosed. Judging from the twelve works listed in the database, his writing and translation activities center mainly on foreign literature, covering categories such as classics and biography. His representative works include The Name of the Rose (revised edition) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as well as several translations connected with Marguerite Duras, such as India (The Collected Works of Duras 7), The Collected Works of Duras 8: Pain, The Vice-Consul, Love (The Collected Works of Duras 5), Love, and Memoir. These titles show that he attends both to classic novels from around the world and to the ongoing presentation of Duras's works. His work helps Chinese readers encounter foreign literary classics and gain a sense of the relevant authors and works.