The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras, book of a lifetime: Sex and sensuality

Duras' semi-autobiographical novel follows the story of a widowed school teacher who has spent her life savings on a piece of worthless land in Vietnam

Frankness: Author Marguerite Duras (Getty Images)

When I left school, I landed a job in the library of a small provincial town in New Zealand. It was the 1950s, and it was a plum job for a country girl. The head librarian was strikingly beautiful, although her hair, the colour of a pale hydrangea and wound up in a chic French roll, might seem passé today. She saw "something" in me, and invited me to share her reading tastes. I was beguiled. She introduced me to the 19th-century Russian novelists and short story writers (I might otherwise have missed Chekhov) and French writers, past and present. Along the way, I picked up Marguerite Duras' semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall (1950).

The story of a widowed school teacher who has been drawn to Indo-China, and spent her life savings on a piece of worthless land in Vietnam was, in an odd sort of way, the story of my own family. After the Second World War, my father had bought land in the north of this country from people who were selling off fag-end allotments at inflated prices. But, whereas our problem was drought and lack of water, for Ma and her children, Joseph and Suzanne, it is the encroachment of the sea onto their rice paddy fields that bankrupts them.

A sea wall, built to stem the flow, collapses. Each of these main characters battles the disaster in their own way. Suzanne, reckless, wild, and about my age then, discovers in her sexuality a path to freedom. The deals she makes are not ones I would have made. And yet. Duras wrote about sex and sensuality with a pragmatism that stirred me. I was stunned by her frankness, by the forthright acknowledgement that sex was not, in itself, a sin. In those faraway days, here in New Zealand, that was enlightening. I was drawn, too, to the attraction between people of other races.

I can't say for certain whether it was this book, Duras' subsequent works (particularly, the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour and her novel The Lover ) or the unorthodox author herself who would captivate me for a lifetime. But I have travelled in her footsteps, aboard a flat-bottomed boat along the Mekong, to find the setting for The Sea Wall, to the boarding house her mother ran briefly in Hanoi, to her house at Neauphle-le-Château. Through her, I began to understand difference.

Fiona Kidman's new book is 'The Infinite Air' (Aardvark Bureau)