I overwhelmed myself with tragedy, it broke out everywhere, from all sides. And I’m to blame. At least you might think that, but I, I know that it doesn’t matter to me. There’s nothing to do about boredom, I’m bored, but one day I won’t be bored anymore. Soon. I’ll know that it’s not even worth the trouble. We’ll have the easy life.
Released for the first time in English (in a translation by Emma Ramadan), with an introduction by American novelist Kate Zambreno, Marguerite Duras’ ironically titled The Easy Life fits in nicely with my notion of the midcentury French philosophical novel (à la Camus or de Beauvoir), where there is less plot (action) than interior monologue (reaction), but despite the out-of-timeness of this narrative, I think that Duras captured something true and enduring about the restrictions imposed (even self-imposed) on the female life and mind. As Zambreno recounts in the Intro, written in 1943 — at a time when Duras’ husband was a prisoner at Buchenwald for his participation with the French Resistance (as Duras likewise had participated) and having suffered some personal tragedies that are echoed in the plot — Duras would later report that this novel poured out of her, “as if in one breath”. Told from the POV of a twenty-five-year-old French farmgirl (the same age Duras had been when she wrote this, set in the rural locale of her own late father’s childhood), this is the story of an existential crisis and how a person might overcome both chaos and ennui to find a way — or even a reason — to live. A bit old-fashioned and cerebral, The Easy Life is less about story than philosophy but I identified with the humanity of this and am pleased to have read Duras for the first time. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
I didn’t say anything else to Maman. But Jérôme had to disappear from Les Bugues. So that Nicolas could begin to live. It had to stop someday. That day had come.
As The Easy Life opens, the narrator, Francine, explains that her younger brother, Nicolas, has just had a violent run-in with their uncle, Jérôme. Francine soon shares that the family’s fortunes were negatively affected by Jérôme’s actions over the years — he had frittered away the family money, making it so Nicolas couldn’t have an education and Francine could not marry; the family had even been forced out of a middle class life in Belgium because of Jérôme (and his more recent actions had been even less honourable) — so although the uncle seems an unrepentant drain on the family, it’s nonetheless surprising when no one really reacts as Jérôme screams in agony for days from what will become his deathbed. Francine herself is a passive and emotionless character — working on the family farm and serving others in the house because it is expected of her — and all of the characters more or less drift across each others’ paths, counting off the days of toil until their own deaths. When tragedy truly strikes the household, Francine experiences an existential crisis and she is offered a solo trip to the seaside to get her head in order. Part Two of the novel concerns her time away and mostly consists of Francine’s inner monologue that runs like:
My life: a fruit I must have eaten some of without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image. You recognize it. It must be mine. I’m all right with that. I can’t do anything differently. I am that girl, there, once and for all and forever. I started to be her twenty-five years ago. I can’t even hold myself in my arms. I am bound to this waist I cannot encircle. My mouth, and the sound of my laugh, never will I know them. Yet I wish I could embrace the girl that I am and love her.
Or:
I feel the proud weariness of being born, of having come to the end of this birth. Before me, there was nothing in my place. Now there is me in place of nothing. It’s a difficult inheritance. Hence the feeling that I am an air thief. Now you know it and you welcome being in the world. I steal my place from the air, but I am happy. Here. Here I am. I sprawl. It’s beautiful out. I am flour in the sun.
Even as Francine leaves the seaside after two weeks (Part Three), she is passive and detached from those around her, but when she returns to Les Bugues, she starts to see a way forward. Hers seemed a familiar (if extreme) coming of age story: I remember being twenty-five and wondering who I was or who I could be; wondering how to find meaning in the narrow space between boredom and chaos. And as Zambreno assures us in the Intro, this — Duras’ second novel — sets the foundations for everything that would eventually be known as “Durassian”; it’s considered an “important” novel, and it reads like one.
