The Dam

The Dam is the first volume of the Collected Works of Marguerite Duras published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. It collects three novels that the French writer Marguerite Duras wrote between 1943 and 1950: The Unspeakable, The Peaceful Life, and The Sea Wall Against the Pacific. These three works are Duras's earliest literary attempts; their plots are largely drawn from her childhood and family experience and are markedly autobiographical, while the technique still follows a relatively traditional narrative mode, with complete and coherent plots and a flowing, extended style. The Unspeakable is Duras's first novel; it depicts a domineering mother, a spoiled elder brother, and a lonely girl excluded from the mother-son alliance, and the familial triangle that haunted Duras all her life first appears here. The Peaceful Life is narrated in the voice of a young woman: an affair between her uncle and her brother's wife is discovered by her brother, her brother's lover then falls in love with her own lover, and her brother takes his life in despair, while she, on a journey, witnesses a man drown; love and death thus become themes Duras would revisit endlessly. The Sea Wall Against the Pacific is the most autobiographical and most influential of the three, telling of a mother living hard with her twenty-year-old son Joseph and sixteen-year-old daughter Suzanne on a leased concession in French Indochina; to save the saline land that the tides flood year after year, the mother spends all her savings and leads local peasants in building a sea wall against the Pacific, only for the works to collapse in the tide. The novel has been adapted for film several times. This volume is the first of the Collected Works of Marguerite Duras.