Customer Reviews

The Vice-Consul (Pantheon Modern Writers Original)

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Edward Said wrote "Orientalism", in which he criticized the West and Western scholars, novelists, and artists for creating images and discourses about the "East" (in his case mostly the Middle East) which then allowed the West to feel that they knew the peoples and cultures of much of the world, and further, that this supposedly-accurate knowledge allowed them to control that part of the world. The lethargic, inchoate, unknowable East had to be ruled by people with get-up-and-go, who else but Westerners ? The West explained the "others" to themselves and came to dominate even Eastern thought about the East itself. The history of the post-colonial era has been one of gradual "de-orientalizing". As an anthropologist who has worked in India and lived in many Asian countries, I found Duras' novel extremely offensive in a way, though I admit her style of writing is intriguing. She "controls" the East, shaping it---as if that were her right---in the way she wants, to produce a certain effect. She plays with geography, she plays with politics and history, paying no attention to any aspect of reality. She presumes to be able to enter into the thoughts of a poor Cambodian girl kicked out of her village home for being unmarried and pregnant. While novels dealing with Westerners in other locales are often very interesting, it is generally a poor gambit for Westerners to try to view the world through the eyes of non-Westerners. I strongly feel that Duras' attempt here borders on the insulting. As for the other characters, their emotions, words, and actions are extremely vague, nothing much happens, the reader penetrates very little into minds or motives. Atmosphere is everything.

Unless you are a lover of such atmosphere unconnected to any real sort of place, you are going to find this book either tedious or annoying. I found it to be both. Calcutta is a teeming city of political and intellectual ferment, full of poverty and great wealth side by side, literature, and constant lively discussion, but you get absolutely zero sense of that here. Duras' characters move in an unreal world in a fog of "artsiness". French literature has a well-deserved, grand reputation, but I would say that THE VICE-CONSUL occupies a position far to the rear in the serried ranks of great French novels.