Marguerite Duras’s second novel, La Vie tranquille, first published in 1944 and now translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan as The Easy Life, has often been overlooked by critics. Duras herself initially dismissed it, explaining that she did not recognise herself in the books she wrote up to Moderato Cantabile in 1958. Yet in the 1960s the book was hailed as an “unknown masterpiece”, one “that explains and heralds her later work”. Readers familiar with her subsequent writing, in particular The Lover (1984) or A Sea Wall (1950), will recognize familiar territory. A coming-of-age tale, it chronicles a young woman’s search for identity, the intensity and violence of family ties, the push and pull of romantic entanglement and ambiguous, if not incestuous, relations between siblings.
Written during the dark years of the occupation, a period of her œuvre better remembered for War: A Memoir (1985) and her posthumously published Wartime Notebooks (2006), The Easy Life is conspicuously shielded from historical turmoil. Set in a timeless rural Périgord, it opens on a scene of almost biblical proportions: a man killing his uncle for sleeping with his wife. The narrator, Francine, recounts the dying agony of her uncle Jérôme, the claustrophobic atmosphere of a poor household forced to stick together and stay silent to protect Nicolas, her brother, from the law. The killing unlocks a shifting series of love triangles: Francine relinquishes her love for her brother and starts a liaison with Tiène, a family friend who has come to work on the farm. Nicolas falls in love with the alluring yet fickle Luce. Seemingly innocent, they are like “two young animals playing”. This fraught idyll, where lives are attuned to the rhythms of nature and the farm, is described with a poetic energy alive to the overpowering discovery of sexuality. The second part of the novel sees Francine, shattered by the suicide of her brother, retreat to a seaside resort on the Atlantic coast to grieve. There she is beset with hallucinated memories of their closeness, realising that she has lived vicariously through him. Her sense of disassociation is described with clinical precision in Duras’s more recognisably pithy prose: “I was no one, I had neither name nor face”.
Duras’s leitmotifs – her unforgiving scrutiny of the intensities of desire, of love turned into hatred, of grief verging with madness – form the fabric of The Easy Life. The few critics to have discussed the book have seen Francine as a precursor of the author’s later protagonists, Lol V. Stein, Aurélia Steiner and the narrator of The Lover. La Vie tranquille was published soon after Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) and Camus’ L’Étranger (1942), and this translation brings the existential streak of Duras’s early writing to the fore. Family drama seems without purpose, propelled by an inscrutable dynamic over which the protagonists have no control. These questions of freedom as time-bound exercises are played out against a joyful celebration of the senses: Francine recovers a sense of self by surrendering to the wind, the waves and the ebb and flow of the sea. Her acute self-awareness is also revealing of Duras’s feminism: a woman is invited to overcome her sense of contingency by owning her impulses at the risk of losing herself. Francine is drawn towards Tiène by such an instinct, “dammed between her hips”, “a kind of wisdom that is wiser than [herself].” Late in her life Duras described La Vie tranquille as a story about a sister’s “adoration” of her brother. Disturbingly couched in incestuous terms, it represents a fantasy of merging identities: the novel dramatizes the ruses of Francine’s heart to overcome this transgressive desire and re-channel it towards Tiène.
With its recurring violent deaths and repressed guilt, The Easy Life echoes Duras’s wartime writing in suggesting that family narratives may be as deceitful and stifling as national ones. The novel also rehearses, at times word for word, the Wartime Notebooks and War: A Memoir as they respectively describe her grief over her brother’s death, the loss of her stillborn child fathered with Robert Antelme, the pain of the latter’s deportation to Buchenwald and her guilt over her liaison with the activist Dionys Mascolo. In the opening pages of War Duras dismissed “literature” as inadequate to convey her wartime experience, yet much of it can be found sotto voce in The Easy Life. Is it perhaps Marguerite as well as Francine who cries over both a lost brother and a lost baby, as the repeated images of an empty maternal body seem to suggest?
The ending of the novel is perhaps unrealistically life-affirming, with Francine returning to the farm to marry Tiène and bear his children. Yet it recalls the Marguerite Duras’s decision to have Mascolo’s child rather than stay by Antelme’s side. The Easy Life resonates with the uneasy choices that she confronted in life. As such it chronicles an instinct for survival that prevails over war and death.
Henriette Korthals Altes is a Research Fellow at the Maison Française d’Oxford
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