The Easy Life
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The Easy Life
Narrated by:
Caroline Hewitt
Buy Now for £11.61
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Narrated by:
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Caroline Hewitt
For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras’s foundational masterpiece about a young woman’s existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.
The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.
An extraordinary examination of a young woman’s estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.©2023 Kate Zambreno (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Duras’s second novel appears for the first time in English with an immensely lucid and incantatory translation by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, plus a firecracker of an introductory essay by Kate Zambreno. Its three-part cycle of tragedy and its aftermath investigates both the ability of people to sway those they love and the question of whether a person’s character is, indeed, fate.
A new look at Marguerite Duras, who shocked the literary world.
Remarkable . . . The Easy Life is constructed with the same torqued intensity as all her fiction, seeding the problems that will eventually become Durassian preoccupations: the anguish of poverty, the vertigo of young love, the pull of biological conformity, and the struggle of women to reconcile the requirements of feminine competence with the disorganizing effects of sexual desire . . . Exquisite . . . Soaring.
The thrill of reading [The Easy Life] comes from seeing all of the ways Duras was already the writer she would spend the next 50 years becoming, from recognizing how the interests she cultivated throughout her career were already in progress. If Duras’s power comes in part from the way her voice enmeshes you in its intensity, this early novel gives us a glimpse of how she learned to wield that voice … Most important, the novel allows the murkiness of everyday emotion to live on the page without straining to explain it, trusting the universality of human experience to render these ideas legible to the reader.
One of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists.
Seeded with early indicators of its complicated author's talent.
Marguerite Duras was a literary phenomenon . . . In The Easy Life . . . the quintessential Duras tone is already here – stripped-down staccato sentences, remorseless introspection . . . There is a significant cumulative effect. The writing creates an effective climate for the story; it has energy and self-sufficiency that nicely convey the claustrophobia and sexual tension of the group and the place . . . Eight decades on, Duras’s nascent talent is on display here.
The bold, internal-facing voice, the dissection of a twisted moral code unique to a family, and the drive to tell the truth about women’s sexuality, hold more than historic interest. This novel makes recent book-world discussions of whether main characters need to be likable and whether novels should offer ethics lessons seem simplistic and retrograde. Duras’s sui generis style is here, fully formed, as is her lifelong interest in illuminating the depths of the human psyche.
At times amazingly good . . . always unflinching in its contemplation of life’s great intensities . . . carries the inexorable force of Greek tragedy.
Racing like a tongue of fire that has found a fuse . . . rendered with stunning, feral clarity by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes . . . [an] excellent new translation.
Classic . . . Duras's fiction burn[s] with life.
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