These days, that book would probably have a different title, given that it’s about a 15-year-old white girl’s sexual relationship with a Chinese businessman more than a decade her senior in Saigon, near where Duras was born and raised in what was then French Indochina. “The Lover” came out when Duras was 70 (it’s never too late!), won the prestigious Prix Goncourt that had eluded her over a long and prolific career, and continues to be passed around and pored over.
“Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all,” Duras recorded in it presciently, years before the internet made everyone a créateur or -trice. “I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read.”
Produced during World War II when writing was still a romantic act, “The Easy Life” is an understandably simpler and more homespun book than “The Lover,” from its rural setting to its skein of a marriage plot. Unlike Duras’s parents — her father died young, and she took her last name from his hometown — Françou’s are still together, if a little loopy and logy. (They tend to huddle together conspiratorially whispering.) After a series of even more unfortunate family events, our heroine — invasive ruminations arriving “each one with a little mouse face” — retreats alone to a hotel by the ocean.
There has been much contemplation of nature’s rhythms; Duras describes an “August-before-September vertigo,” where “woods, ripe plains, warmed cliffs, stood still in a supernatural stupor.” When Françou met with her paramour, Tiène, magnolia leaves trickled down from the trees “between the swaths of total silence,” in what would now seem only imaginable in a perfume commercial. The ocean itself is ominous and, like much of Duras’s imagery, vaguely sexualized; night, she writes, “would arrive with its parade of stars and moons in a motionless straddling of the sea.”
The translation, by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, flows smoothly; only the over-modern phrase “call out,” when Françou shames Tiène in conversation, jarred. I did wonder about the choice to render “tranquille” as “easy,” rather than “quiet” or “calm.” There’s an American ring to that — the Big Easy, easy listening, easy-peasy — while Duras, though her prose is spare and concentrated, is practically an avatar of French existential difficulty.
