The Desire for Agency
Marguerite Duras, trans. Emma Ramadan & Olivia Baes, The Easy Life
Bloomsbury, 208pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781635578515
reviewed by Daisy Sainsbury
Published in 1944 when the author was 30, The Easy Life was Marguerite Duras’s second novel. Thanks to co-translators Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, it is now appearing in English for the first time, nearly 80 years later. Very few of Duras’s works have remained untranslated for so long, which poses the obvious question of why. Was the delay simply a product of happenstance? Or is this early novel not very good? The answer, I suspect, is somewhere between the two. Set on an isolated farmstead in rural, south-west France, The Easy Life contains a nuanced study of a young woman attempting to take agency over her life and forge her own identity, but it is weighed down by a strangely cumbersome plot which often works against rather than for the character development that the entire novel hinges on.
In the opening pages, 25-year-old narrator Francine Veyrenattes (‘Françou’) has prompted her brother, Nicolas, to kill their uncle, by revealing that he is having an affair with Nicolas’s wife. Their uncle doesn’t die straight away. His death is slow and drawn out over the course of a week, during which time we learn more about the family history. Twenty years prior, the Veyrenattes fled Belgium in disgrace after Françou’s father, then town mayor, stole money from the council’s coffers to pay off their uncle’s debts. If this provides some further explanation for the death that initiates the novel, it doesn’t detract from what we understand to be the real motive: Françou’s feelings of boredom, invisibility and impotence – in short, her ‘desire to change [her] existence’.
When their uncle does eventually die, his lover, Nicolas’s wife, appears in Françou’s bedroom with her bags packed. Françou doesn’t stop her going but does insist she leave her baby son behind. Nicolas wastes no time pursuing a beautiful, charismatic family friend, Luce Barragues — a relationship that Françou has facilitated, but nonetheless feels jealous about. The ambiguous nature of her jealousy is compounded by the unsettling, claustrophobic dynamics at the farmstead, where Françou observes Luce and Nicolas’s sexual encounters (and before that, their uncle’s with Nicolas’s wife). Perhaps spurred on by her brother’s attention being elsewhere, Françou begins a relationship with Nicolas’s friend, farmhand Tiène. Tiène has also caught Luce’s eye, and when Nicolas realises his love for her is not reciprocated, he kills himself. The question of whether his remorse over killing his uncle also motivated his suicide is left open-ended.
In the second of the novel’s three parts, Françou travels alone to the seaside where she spends two weeks grieving the loss of her brother and contemplating her own mortality, her life hitherto, her shifting sense of identity. . . She spends a lot of her time looking at her reflection in the mirror of her hotel bedroom. When she does make it outdoors, she observes a man drown in front of her on the beach but doesn’t intervene. In the third and final part, Françou returns to the farm with a new-found sense of purpose: she sends Luce packing, decides she will marry Tiène (Tiène doesn’t seem to have a say in the matter), and assumes her role as head of the household.
I suspect The Easy Life will be generously received by critics not least because, in a 20th-century canon still largely dominated by men, Duras represents one of the few great French women writers known to the English-speaking world. The jacket copy describes the book as a ‘little-known masterpiece’ which strikes me as only half true: little-known, yes, but certainly not a masterpiece. The French novelist Raymond Queneau, who assessed the original manuscript for Gallimard (and ultimately recommended it for publication), wrote in his reader’s report: ‘The second part is boring. The whole is a tad botched.’ I think there is some truth in this appraisal.
For a formidable figure like Duras, it is tempting to retrospectively ascribe intentionality to the shortcomings of early work — to say that if readers find her writing slow, it is because they have failed to grasp the greater purpose that that slowness is serving. Perhaps this is due to our ongoing commitment to the concept of genius, to infallible literary talent, but whatever the reason, and at risk of overlooking some Durassian masterplan, the pacing of The Easy Life strikes me as disjointed. Lengthy passages of introspective reflection are interrupted by an abrupt sentence or two describing the events unfolding. Sometimes this works. In the scene where Françou observes a man drowning, the short description of his death comes at the tail end of a long, hypnotic passage where she lies on the beach, watching the waves, caught in an existential revery – a feeling of losing herself in the sea. The result is dramatically effective (the death comes as a surprise for the reader) and serves to illustrate both the locus of Françou’s attention, placed not in the fate of another human being but focused inwards instead, as well as the sense of detachment from reality, and from herself, that she experiences in the wake of her brother’s death.
At other times — in fact, a lot of the time — the discrepancy in pacing highlights a disconnect between the complex psychological interiority that Duras lends Françou and the decisions she has her make. I think the issue here is one of plausibility. Of course, plausibility is not a prerequisite of fiction, but if an author is to insist on the psychological realism of a character, then surely that character’s actions must derive organically from that same psychology. This is not the case in The Easy Life, where the narrative arc — the neat three-death, three-part plot — feels like an unwieldy superstructure imposed by its author. The most obvious problem is the novel’s ending. Even if we think Françou’s desire for agency is sufficient motivation to incite her uncle’s death (and sure, why not?), then the book’s quiet resolution — return to the family home, happy ending via marriage — feels unconvincing. Is a woman whose inner turmoil has required such dramatic expression in earlier pages now going to opt into what she sees as a life of domestic boredom simply because she has chosen this destiny, rather than had it thrust upon her?
In interviews, Duras was dismissive of her early work, describing everything she published before Moderato cantabile (1958) as being no longer of interest to her. According to Laure Adler’s 1998 biography, Duras said that she wrote The Easy Life quickly, that she soon forgot it and no longer wished to discuss it. Rightly or wrongly, some critics have attributed this dismissal to the difficult period in which Duras wrote the book: 1943, a year after the death of her younger brother and her stillborn child. These biographical events have coloured subsequent interpretations. One critic, Noelle English, describes it as a ‘therapeutic novel’ that sets out a situation of crisis only to resolve it through an ending that secures the protagonist’s future happiness. Whether we find this reading credible or not, it is true that the novel concludes with an unmistakeable note of triumph. Several references in the text prompt the reader to consider Françou’s homecoming as a gender reversal of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, which casts Tiène in the role of Penelope and Françou as victorious heroine. The phrase that Françou repeats as she walks back to the house, ‘we’ll have the easy life,’ sounds less like an ironic refrain and more like genuine wishful thinking – on the part of both narrator and novelist – that new love might quell the pain of grief, that optimism about the future might transcend past hardship.
There are some extraordinarily beautiful passages in The Easy Life — on boredom and the body, on death and the willing of the self into being. They are written in Duras’s characteristically transportive prose: her lines sweep you up, carry you along, draw you into the meditative cadencies of her protagonist’s mind. The novel lays the foundations for subjects to which she will later return: violence, not just of the overt, physical kind, but also the quiet harm inflicted within sibling and parent-child relationships by words not addressed, by the refusal to engage; and conversely, love, manifested through the supreme act of paying attention. While The Easy Life will not be the best introduction to Duras, readers already familiar with her work will appreciate seeing the author grappling with these nascent thematic concerns that find a more accomplished expression in her later writing.
In the opening pages, 25-year-old narrator Francine Veyrenattes (‘Françou’) has prompted her brother, Nicolas, to kill their uncle, by revealing that he is having an affair with Nicolas’s wife. Their uncle doesn’t die straight away. His death is slow and drawn out over the course of a week, during which time we learn more about the family history. Twenty years prior, the Veyrenattes fled Belgium in disgrace after Françou’s father, then town mayor, stole money from the council’s coffers to pay off their uncle’s debts. If this provides some further explanation for the death that initiates the novel, it doesn’t detract from what we understand to be the real motive: Françou’s feelings of boredom, invisibility and impotence – in short, her ‘desire to change [her] existence’.
When their uncle does eventually die, his lover, Nicolas’s wife, appears in Françou’s bedroom with her bags packed. Françou doesn’t stop her going but does insist she leave her baby son behind. Nicolas wastes no time pursuing a beautiful, charismatic family friend, Luce Barragues — a relationship that Françou has facilitated, but nonetheless feels jealous about. The ambiguous nature of her jealousy is compounded by the unsettling, claustrophobic dynamics at the farmstead, where Françou observes Luce and Nicolas’s sexual encounters (and before that, their uncle’s with Nicolas’s wife). Perhaps spurred on by her brother’s attention being elsewhere, Françou begins a relationship with Nicolas’s friend, farmhand Tiène. Tiène has also caught Luce’s eye, and when Nicolas realises his love for her is not reciprocated, he kills himself. The question of whether his remorse over killing his uncle also motivated his suicide is left open-ended.
In the second of the novel’s three parts, Françou travels alone to the seaside where she spends two weeks grieving the loss of her brother and contemplating her own mortality, her life hitherto, her shifting sense of identity. . . She spends a lot of her time looking at her reflection in the mirror of her hotel bedroom. When she does make it outdoors, she observes a man drown in front of her on the beach but doesn’t intervene. In the third and final part, Françou returns to the farm with a new-found sense of purpose: she sends Luce packing, decides she will marry Tiène (Tiène doesn’t seem to have a say in the matter), and assumes her role as head of the household.
I suspect The Easy Life will be generously received by critics not least because, in a 20th-century canon still largely dominated by men, Duras represents one of the few great French women writers known to the English-speaking world. The jacket copy describes the book as a ‘little-known masterpiece’ which strikes me as only half true: little-known, yes, but certainly not a masterpiece. The French novelist Raymond Queneau, who assessed the original manuscript for Gallimard (and ultimately recommended it for publication), wrote in his reader’s report: ‘The second part is boring. The whole is a tad botched.’ I think there is some truth in this appraisal.
For a formidable figure like Duras, it is tempting to retrospectively ascribe intentionality to the shortcomings of early work — to say that if readers find her writing slow, it is because they have failed to grasp the greater purpose that that slowness is serving. Perhaps this is due to our ongoing commitment to the concept of genius, to infallible literary talent, but whatever the reason, and at risk of overlooking some Durassian masterplan, the pacing of The Easy Life strikes me as disjointed. Lengthy passages of introspective reflection are interrupted by an abrupt sentence or two describing the events unfolding. Sometimes this works. In the scene where Françou observes a man drowning, the short description of his death comes at the tail end of a long, hypnotic passage where she lies on the beach, watching the waves, caught in an existential revery – a feeling of losing herself in the sea. The result is dramatically effective (the death comes as a surprise for the reader) and serves to illustrate both the locus of Françou’s attention, placed not in the fate of another human being but focused inwards instead, as well as the sense of detachment from reality, and from herself, that she experiences in the wake of her brother’s death.
At other times — in fact, a lot of the time — the discrepancy in pacing highlights a disconnect between the complex psychological interiority that Duras lends Françou and the decisions she has her make. I think the issue here is one of plausibility. Of course, plausibility is not a prerequisite of fiction, but if an author is to insist on the psychological realism of a character, then surely that character’s actions must derive organically from that same psychology. This is not the case in The Easy Life, where the narrative arc — the neat three-death, three-part plot — feels like an unwieldy superstructure imposed by its author. The most obvious problem is the novel’s ending. Even if we think Françou’s desire for agency is sufficient motivation to incite her uncle’s death (and sure, why not?), then the book’s quiet resolution — return to the family home, happy ending via marriage — feels unconvincing. Is a woman whose inner turmoil has required such dramatic expression in earlier pages now going to opt into what she sees as a life of domestic boredom simply because she has chosen this destiny, rather than had it thrust upon her?
In interviews, Duras was dismissive of her early work, describing everything she published before Moderato cantabile (1958) as being no longer of interest to her. According to Laure Adler’s 1998 biography, Duras said that she wrote The Easy Life quickly, that she soon forgot it and no longer wished to discuss it. Rightly or wrongly, some critics have attributed this dismissal to the difficult period in which Duras wrote the book: 1943, a year after the death of her younger brother and her stillborn child. These biographical events have coloured subsequent interpretations. One critic, Noelle English, describes it as a ‘therapeutic novel’ that sets out a situation of crisis only to resolve it through an ending that secures the protagonist’s future happiness. Whether we find this reading credible or not, it is true that the novel concludes with an unmistakeable note of triumph. Several references in the text prompt the reader to consider Françou’s homecoming as a gender reversal of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, which casts Tiène in the role of Penelope and Françou as victorious heroine. The phrase that Françou repeats as she walks back to the house, ‘we’ll have the easy life,’ sounds less like an ironic refrain and more like genuine wishful thinking – on the part of both narrator and novelist – that new love might quell the pain of grief, that optimism about the future might transcend past hardship.
There are some extraordinarily beautiful passages in The Easy Life — on boredom and the body, on death and the willing of the self into being. They are written in Duras’s characteristically transportive prose: her lines sweep you up, carry you along, draw you into the meditative cadencies of her protagonist’s mind. The novel lays the foundations for subjects to which she will later return: violence, not just of the overt, physical kind, but also the quiet harm inflicted within sibling and parent-child relationships by words not addressed, by the refusal to engage; and conversely, love, manifested through the supreme act of paying attention. While The Easy Life will not be the best introduction to Duras, readers already familiar with her work will appreciate seeing the author grappling with these nascent thematic concerns that find a more accomplished expression in her later writing.