Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 208 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes.
It took almost 80 years, but it’s wonderful that Marguerite Duras‘ second novel, The Easy Life, has finally been translated into English for the first time.
Originally published in her native France in 1944, this extraordinary novel is about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of two family tragedies in close succession.
It’s essentially a coming-of-age tale (told in the first person) and is divided into three parts.
The first charts 25-year-old Francine Veyrenatte’s life on the family farm, where her boredom is punctuated by two tragic deaths; the second follows her time in a hotel by the sea, where she goes to deal with her grief but unravels psychologically; and the third is what happens when she returns home.
Power and passion
It’s a maudlin, sometimes painful, story, and one that treads a morally ambiguous line — the first death, for instance, is essentially a murder that is covered up when the family closes rank — but it also possesses great power and passion because we feel the enormous personal transformation that Francine goes through and want to cheer her on.
As an account of resilience and stoicism in the face of adversity, it’s a compelling read, but it’s also a beautifully rendered tale highlighting what happens when people living in isolated communities turn on themselves.
Secluded farm
In Les Bugues, where the family grows tobacco crops on a secluded farm surrounded by woods, the atmosphere is claustrophobic and taciturn: Francine’s adored brother, Nicholas, has beaten up their uncle Jérôme — for reasons that have been brewing for years, but mainly involve Jérôme sleeping with Nicholas’s wife, Clémence, who is also the family’s maid.
In a cold, detached and almost cruel voice, Francine details Jérôme’s slow and painful demise (he takes 10 days to die):
In strong, regular jolts, his legs and arms stiffened; his mournful cry burst through the rooms, the garden, the courtyard, crossed the field between the path and the forest and crouched in the bushes filled with birds and sunshine. He was a beast we wanted to restrain but that managed to escape the house and, once outside, became dangerous to us. Jérôme had not yet lost hope that the outside world would rescue him, while knowing that he was alone at Les Bugues with us, who kept him completely out of sight. (p10)
After his passing, the household’s sense of normality does not resume: Clémence flees to the arms of her own family, for instance, leaving her young son behind, and a romance develops between Nicholas and Luce, a beautiful woman from his past whom everyone adores. Francine also acts upon her attraction to Tiène, who runs the farm, and there’s an expectation, from her mother, that the pair will marry.
But then another tragedy strikes (I’ll refrain from explaining it because it spoils the plot), and this is when Francine, desperate to do something exciting for herself while she has the opportunity, catches the train to T., a town on the Atlantic coast, where she will spend the last days of summer alone in a boardinghouse.
Respite by the sea
But with too much time on her hands and unmoored from her usual routines, Francine becomes deeply introspective and dissociates from herself — notice the shift in pronouns in the following paragraph:
Here, in my room, it’s me. It’s as if she no longer knows it’s her. She sees herself in the mirrored armoire; she’s a tall girl with blond hair, yellowed by the sun, a tan face. In the bedroom, she takes up too much space. From the very small open suitcase, she pulls out three blouses to look natural before the girl watching her. Though she avoids seeing herself, she sees what she’s doing in the mirrored armoire. (p94)
Towards the end of her holiday, an incident on the beach shakes her out of her self-imposed stupor and passivity, forcing her to consider who she is and what she wants out of life.
And so, after 15 days away, in which she’s fallen apart and then put herself back together, she heads home determined to pursue an easy life (hence the book’s title), which is the one mapped out for her, rather than one that might be less predictable and more challenging.
Disquieting and distinctive
There’s a lot to like in this deeply disquieting novel written in Duras’ distinctive style, which is introspective, dark and fierce.
Her prose is eloquent and perceptive (especially when referring to matters of the heart and sexual attraction), but it can also cut to the quick. She expertly conveys mood and suspense by the rhythm and repetition of her words and by keeping her sentences short. It’s almost as if she is writing music to be performed staccato.
This edition, which includes a foreword by American novelist, essayist, critic and professor Kate Zamreno, has a terrific translators’ note, which explains some of the challenges associated with translating the prose into English. I’ll let them have the last word:
We channeled Francine’s boredom, her chaos, her youth and inherent old age. We let ourselves feel her fatigue, her containment, and her fragmentation, in turns. That’s how you translate Duras: you become one of her dreamers and degenerates. (p187)
