L'Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras

Do you know that murder doesn't happen all of a sudden? No. It creeps up slowly, like a tank. And then it stops. And there it is. A murder has just been committed in Vine. By Claire Lannes. There's no going back on it. Murder has descended on Viorne. It was hovering high in the air above, and it's there where Viorne is that it fell, in that house, in the kitchen of that house, and the one who did it--oh... the one who did it is Claire Lannes. She knew that the murder was there, and that only a thread kept it from falling on Viorne.

A policeman arrives at a bar in the French town of Viorne searching for information about a gruesome murder that has captivated the national press: a series of dismembered body parts, discovered on trains all around the country, which have been traced back to the rail junction at Viorne. As he discusses theories with the patrons there, a woman, Claire Lannes, comes up and confesses: she is the one who committed the murder. The victim is Marie-Therese, a deaf and mute woman who was Claire's cousin and housekeeper. L'Amante Anglaise tells this story as a series of interviews between an unnamed writer, who wants to write a book about Claire, and three figures: Robert, the bar owner; Pierre, Claire's husband; and Claire herself.

I think it's only when you read an author's second book that you really begin to understand who they are as a writer. L'Amante Anglaise shares with Duras' incredible book The Lover a sense that the real story is not being told, that it lies somewhere below the surface, inaccessible to both the reader and the characters themselves. Claire--whose section is by far the novel's most interesting--seems to have no idea why she killed her cousin. Murder, as she describes it, is a force that descends from outside, taking a place or a person as its vessel or host. And yet, she thinks that she might have answers for the writer, if only the writer would pose the right questions. But of course, she doesn't know the right questions any more than the writer does.

Truth, where it exists, is hidden; the novel's title, L'Amante Anglaise is written in French to retain the pun between la menthe anglaise, or English mint, Claire's favorite plant in her beloved garden, and l'amante en glaise, a "lover in sand" or "clay," which is her Freudian-slip pronunciation. Does Claire murder her cousin because of some inexpressible jealousy toward her dalliances with their friend Alfonso, or her sexual jealousy more broadly? What does it mean when the writer suggests that Claire has acted out not her own desire, but Pierre's, a desire to be free of both wife and housekeeper? Is Marie-Therese's still-missing head buried in the garden among the English mint?

I'm unsure what to think about L'Amante Anglaise. Its brief and oblique nature make it seem somehow incomplete--missing, like Marie-Therese, the identifying feature that will make it all make sense. Does L'Amante Anglaise conceal a buried secret, or does it only point toward the idea of secrets? Is there a truth at the heart of it, or only a gesture toward the possibility of truth? What's most interesting about it is, I think, the way it turns familiar stories of investigation and detective work on their head. The writer who seems so incisive with Robert and Pierre, working doggedly and shrewdly toward truth, seems suddenly stymied by Claire. So stymied, in fact, that the writer actually begins to lose interest in the conversation. It's a detective story that ends with a shrug.