Outdoor Snake Pit

THE SEA WALL (288 pp.) -- Marguerite Duras-- Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3.50).

Most Frenchmen have a natural distrust of living anywhere except in France, but the poster swayed the schoolteacher and his wife. It showed a colonial couple, elegant in tropic white, taking their ease in a banana grove, while eager natives bustled at tasks around them. "Young people," assured the poster legend, "a fortune awaits you in the Colonies!" Ma and her husband applied for teaching posts in Indo-China and, one day in 1899, sailed to take them.

The Sea Wall, a first novel by French woman Marguerite Duras, is the story of what happened to these babes in the Cambodia woods.

Pa survived only a few years, but Ma was made of fiercer things. Having quit her teaching job to take care of the two babies, Joseph and Suzanne, she began to give private lessons in French and to play the piano at a moviehouse named the "Eden." In twelve grim years she saved enough money to buy a government land concession on a plain bordering the sea.

Ma began to work her acres with joy, only to find that her land was literally a washout. Every summer, just before harvest time, the ocean burst over the whole farm and destroyed the crops. The first time Ma saw it happen, a little of her reason was carried away too. Against all advice, she borrowed to the limit of her credit and built a sea wall to keep the ocean out. But in one season, the crabs ate through the mangrove pilings, and one night the sea carried everything away. Soon after, Ma began to throw fits.

The rest of the book is a close-up of a paranoiac in a jungle clearing, screaming revenge on her whole life, while the tropics close in like an ant horde and nibble her to death with minor misfortunes. Her children struggle to break free of the inner jungle of Ma's spirit, only to find themselves in the outer jungle of a degenerate colonial society.

For U.S. readers, Author Duras' characters will have something of the fascination and strangeness of people from an exotic, outdoor Snake Pit. In France, where the book has already been published, it should confirm the widespread French conviction that there's no place like home.

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