Book review: ‘The Easy Life,’ by Marguerite Duras

Among those excited by the book’s new life is Kate Zambreno, an avant-garde autofictionist who contributed the introduction to the English edition.

Taking a cue from her literary heroine, Zambreno gets personal in explaining her approach to the book: “I take notes on Duras with my breast still out. The baby’s father and her sister are in the kitchen, making hot chocolate, tofu for soup.”

With a well-thumbed stack of Duras novels on her nightstand, Zambreno has background on the book to impart: Despite being criticized for its “muddled narrative” and a “lack of control,” Gallimard published “The Easy Life” (“La Vie Tranquille,”) anyway, recognizing “a true writer’s voice.” Zambreno praises the book’s fractured nature. It’s a style, she says, that will become the author’s “trademark in later works — the instability of point of view, of her sense of self, a woman alone in a room, staring at a mirror, attempting to both disappear and find herself.”

Annie Ernaux writes about deep pain with cool restraint

I confess I had not read Duras before “The Easy Life,” so I prepared myself for an undisciplined, experimental work — an idea that was both alluring and off-putting. What I found was indeed unruly and unusual.

The opening of the book struck me as almost comical, with its torrent of melodramatic plot combined with a total absence of character development. As the curtain rises, the narrator Francine’s brother Nicolas has killed their uncle Jerôme because Francine spilled the beans on Jerôme’s affair with Nicolas’s wife, Clémence. In the wake of this, Clémence takes off, leaving her young child Noël in the care of Francine. Nicolas tentatively reconnects with his own longtime other-woman, Luce, but eventually lies down on the train tracks and kills himself. After his death, Luce comes after Francine’s own boyfriend, Tiène.

“Chaos, boredom, chaos,” as the narrator summarizes it.

For my part, I couldn’t help recalling what they used to say at the end of every episode of “Love of Chair,” the Electric Company’s soap opera parody — “And … what about Naomi?”

But back to the so-called easy life.

In Part 2, Francine takes off for the beach to absorb the weightiness of it all. “It did happen, Jérôme’s death, but Nicolas is also dead. Clémence is gone, Noël is abandoned. My parents have become quasi-insane, finished.” But she’s begun to doubt that it really is her fault after all. If it were, she thinks, shouldn’t she feel some remorse? In any case, the chaos and boredom continue as she watches impassively from the beach when a man drowns himself in the sea. The people at her hotel are so appalled by her flat reaction to the death that they kick her out!

The famously unstable point of view surfaces in the beach hotel section. The narration begins to alternate between first and third person — “Here, in my room, it’s me. It’s as if she no longer knows it’s her” — and what seems to be the main idea of the book emerges. “If I had known that one day I would have a story, I would have chosen it, I would have lived with more care to make it beautiful and true so that I would like it. Now it’s too late.”

Now she’s stuck with this chaotic, boring story, which she’ll be playing with for the rest of her writing life — dead brothers, crazy mothers, unclear responsibility for one’s actions, the constant undertow of the erotic.

Subscribe to the Book World newsletter

Those of us who read mainly to escape chaos and boredom are not the target audience for “The Easy Life.” More intellectually and philosophically motivated readers, and certainly anyone who already knows and loves Duras, should plunge right in.

You can hope to have an experience similar to that rhapsodically described by the translators, Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, in their afterword. “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.”

I, on the other hand, remain a philistine and a hayseed. Perhaps Annie Ernaux can cure me.

Marion Winik, a professor at the University of Baltimore, is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love,” “The Big Book of the Dead” and, most recently, “Above Us Only Sky.”

By Marguerite Duras. Introduction by Kate Zambreno. Translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes

Bloomsbury. 208 pp. Paperback, $18