Muriel

Muriel is the magnetic student whose brief relationship with the narrator becomes a passage from irony and timidity into sensual freedom, and then into a sharp personal collapse. She draws him toward a life far removed from the future expected of their classmates, but the shared dream of making a home between Paris and Bali ends with her departure and his return alone, carrying the material remains of their failed business scheme.

Identity and First Encounter

The narrator meets Muriel at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris. She is strikingly beautiful and dresses in a way that stands out among students whose clothes signal polished, conventional ambition. Her loud voice and laugh, conversational fillers, and habit of rolling joints mark her as vulgar to the classical-music crowd; the retrospective account presents those qualities not as an embarrassment to be corrected but as part of her independence from the social style around her.

The narrator, by contrast, is a lazy, unmotivated student who writes science-fiction stories and film reviews, wears beat-up Clarks and an old leather jacket, and retains the ironic detachment he had learned in adolescence. He describes himself as timid, yet suggests that his artistic and bohemian manner helped him go out with Muriel, the most sexually striking and least presentable girl in the class. The pairing begins as a mismatch with the ambitions of their surroundings: while other students already imagine themselves ruling France, the two find an alternative in nonconformity.

A Shared Hippie Life

Muriel changes the direction of the narrator’s life. After an adolescence spent reading right-wing writers from the interwar years and dreaming of the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, he finds himself with her on an isolated farm in the Drôme department. Their days there involve smoking grass, listening to John Coltrane, consulting the I Ching with three coins cast onto frayed kilims, and making love. He remembers Muriel as laughing, free of spite, and uninhibited; at twenty, he regards this life as the best thing that could have happened to him.

A small metal joint-rolling machine becomes a lasting keepsake. Muriel gives it to him, with a reminder written on its back in English. He says that opening it still makes him think of her with gratitude and wonder what might have happened had they stayed together longer. The object preserves the tenderness of the relationship in a practical, ordinary form: it is both a tool from their shared life and a prompt for a future that never came to pass.

Surabaya and Bali

After graduating, the narrator undertakes mandatory overseas service rather than become a soldier or reserve officer, and is sent to teach at the French Cultural Center in Surabaya, an industrial port on the eastern tip of Java. Muriel later joins him. They travel by motorbike through the crowds and smells of Asia, and Surabaya becomes the setting in which he writes his first novel, inspired by their experiences with magic mushrooms. His account places the novel within a familiar pattern of Peace Corps workers turning distant postings into literary material, while acknowledging that he embellished his own story heavily.

On vacation they go to Bali, especially Kuta Beach and Legian, where they are drawn less to local ceremonies and traditional life than to the Western expatriate scene of surfing, psychedelic drugs, and torch-lit waterfront parties. The narrator distinguishes its social strata: passing tourists, wary backpackers, Australian surfers, and the more privileged expatriates whom he and Muriel call the chic babas. These people arrive from Goa, rent wooden beach houses for a season, dress in fine linen and silk, practice yoga, and appear to live without pressing obligations. Their money comes from discreet trade, including drugs, precious stones, furniture, and fabric.

Muriel’s beauty and kindness help her gain entry into this milieu. The narrator knows he would not be accepted without her, and his envy emerges as affected disdain. That jealousy is the first sign that their life together is beginning to sour. At the same time, the more they spend in Bali, the less either wants to return to Paris, resume their studies, or take a job. He imagines writing on a terrace by the sea while Muriel goes swimming, a vision of leisure that converts their attraction to the expatriate world into a plan for staying there.

The Failed Plan and Separation

Their first attempt to finance that life is a shipment of bikinis. In Kuta, they find bathing suits decorated with golden thread; Muriel believes they can buy them for a dollar apiece and sell them in Paris for ten times as much. They invest all their money, including the allowance due to the narrator at the end of his overseas service, and order five thousand suits. The French Foreign Ministry is to pay for their shipment to France. The stock is meant to start a financial cycle that will let them divide their time between Paris and Bali, with Bali the preferred home.

The plan outlasts the relationship. A month before the manufacturer delivers the boxes, Muriel leaves the narrator for an older baba whom he sees as more self-assured and socially at ease. He judges himself, by then tormented and increasingly odious, no match for the new partner. He returns to Paris alone with the manuscript of a first novel about an enchanted love story and five thousand bikinis sewn with golden thread. Both become reminders of the life he had imagined with Muriel and then lost.

Narrative Role and Aftermath

The narrator’s account holds Muriel between gratitude and regret. He remembers the pleasure and freedom she brought into his life, but also relates how jealousy and his worsening character accompanied their growing immersion in Bali’s social world. Her departure does not merely end a romance: it breaks apart the linked ambitions of lover, adventurer, and writer. In Paris, he loses weight, feels nearly invisible among passersby, and lives in a studio furnished with a mattress, two chairs, and crates of bikinis used as tables. He offers the suits to visiting women, but they are not popular, and he cannot remember how he eventually got rid of them. Meanwhile, he grows disgusted with his novel and receives publishers’ rejection letters. Muriel’s role in the recollection is therefore inseparable from its reversal: the dream she shared with him briefly seemed like a workable future, while its remains make the failure of that future tangible.