Un barrage contre le Pacifique

Marguerite Duras's Un barrage contre le Pacifique (A Sea Wall) is set in Indochina in the early 1930s. Duras herself was born in Saigon in 1914 and this novel is partly autobiographical. It is also a bitter criticism of French colonialism.

Some analogies have been drawn between this novel and the poor white world of the novels of Erskine Caldwell. Largely set in rural Indochina, the book centers on the hardscrabble life of a widow – who is simply known as 'the mother' – and her two children Suzanne (17) and Joseph (20). They live in a bungalow near the coast, on the plain of Ram, on a concession the mother has bought. But the land is useless for growing rice because tides (from the Chinese Sea, but mentally magnified as the Pacific by the mother) and dwarf crabs destroy the crop every July. The family's diet mainly consists of wading birds. The mother's attempts to build a wall against the tides are fruitless. She writes a number of letters to the land registry about their plight (notably a long one towards the end, which aggressively reveals the extent of her anger), but they are ignored.