Barrage is really the matrix of the work of Duras who will continue thereafter to rewrite his scandalous love story - she is 15 years-with the "Chinese" in French Indochina in the interwar period. We find this story in The Lover and Lover from North China, with some variations. In Dam, the story is still time, writing fairly conventional. The mother, intitutrice old, after the death of father, bought a concession to the colonial government. But the plantation is flooded and so every year crops are devastated by the monsoon. Then pops into his mind the mad project to build a dam to stop the Pacific. Doomed to failure, constantly repeated. And the novel plunges us in tragedy. The madness of the Mother will generate exacerbated feelings, beyond all moral: ambiguous love between brother and sister, the daughter of prostitution by the mother herself. Here's suitor Suzanne is ugly and ridiculous, but the interest of the novel is also in these love-hate relationship between this trio that has lost all mark and reminiscent of the great curse of mythology.
