The older brother continues to become more violent and more criminal and is finally sent away by the mother to France for a supposed education. The narrator's family recognizes the relationship for what it is but mutely accepts it because the rich man provides money and a strained type of social access, which they once knew. The lover lives in fear that the relationship-actually illegal because of the narrator's age-will be discovered. The relationship becomes sexual almost immediately and the young narrator finds immense pleasure in sexual union. The man-the lover-approaches the young girl, makes conversation, and initiates a romantic relationship, which spans the next eighteen months. On the ferry, she is joined by chance by a limousine carrying a wealthy Chinese financier in his mid-thirties. She takes local transportation, which includes a ferry ride over a branch of the vast Mekong River.
The object of his particular wrath is the younger brother, Paulo, and the children spend most of their time in idle dissipations as the Colonial family's fortunes fall into decay and poverty.Īt the age of fifteen and one-half, the narrator travels from Sadec to Saigon to return to school. The narrator's unnamed oldest brother dominates the other children through violence and cruelty, supported entirely by the doting mother.
The narrator's mother, Marie Legrand, spends the next approximate decade working as a French-language school director and slowly dissipating the family's once-substantial wealth. Her father became ill and returned to France for treatment he died in France shortly thereafter. Her father was a colonial officer and her family, consisting of parents, two older brothers, and herself, lived in Sadec, approximately 100 miles from Saigon, across the Mekong River. 1983, the unnamed narrator, an aged woman living in Paris, considers her history as a fifteen-year-old girl living in French Indochina during c. The novel is generally considered highly autobiographical in nature. The girl narrates the novel from the perspective of years and life experience. The girl's family then goes through a period of upheaval in pre-war, German-occupied, and, later, liberated Paris. Finally, the girl and her family return to France, permanently ending the relationship. The affair scandalizes society but is pursued with reckless abandon for about eighteen months. As her family's fortunes decline, she begins a sexual relationship with a much older Chinese man who, in turn, financially supports the family. The novel tells the story of a young French girl living in Colonial French Indochina during the early 1930s.
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