The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras
Review of The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras
The Easy Life by Maguerite Duras (2023). Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Duras has been one of those women writers I always knew about and admired their lives (from what I had studied from books and the Internet), but had never actually picked up a copy of one of her books to read. That is one of my biggest shames to admit, because I know how important Duras was for French literature in the 1900s.
She passed away before I was even born, but her writing truly lives on for the modern day. The Easy Life is only being translated for the firs time in English, and I was wandering my library’s new fiction section when I realized that I had never read Duras and this book was sitting in front of me.
Granted, it was a slim read. The Easy Life is less than two hundred pages long, so I picked it up expecting to read it in a night. And I did. I started it in the bath, and managed to finish the book in a little over an hour. It was the perfect Tuesday evening as I decompressed from working my internship the previous day. While this isn’t a complete masterpiece, I genuinely liked this book a lot!
Onwards with the review.
After tragedy strikes the family farm, Francine realizes she needs to get away
The Easy Life begins with a fight, specifically an ugly one. Known as Françoise to her family, our protagonist has just witnessed a fight between her uncle and brother. Her uncle is left screaming in pain and clutching his side, and the reason for their fight is simple: they’re fighting over a girl.
Her brother is married to Clemence, who has had his child, and the uncle has been seeing her on the side recently at well. The family is also partially estranged from the uncle, despite him living with them, as he is the reason Francine and her brother were unable to get an education and better themselves.
So as her uncle lays dying in his room from the wounds he received, everyone pretty much ignores him. He dies, and no one seems initially too sad about it, although the scars and trauma from the vent are going to find their way to the surface very soon. Clemence ends up fleeing and leaving her son behind, and Francine takes care of the child. Weeks pass, and when Clemence returns, her brother disappears to go away for a bit. Before all of this, Francine is dealing with the friction of another girl pretending to be interested in her brother, when in actuality she’s going after Francine’s potential suitor.
His body is found stretched like a bird’s by the railroad, and it’s implied that he was pretty much cut into thirds by a passing train. Before his death, it’s mentioned that he suddenly keeps bringing up their dead uncle. Before he was okay with the fact he was dead and gone, but her brother seems to have struggled with the fact this actually happened when it clicks in his head.
My interpretation of this could go in one of two ways: he became maddened by the fact he killed a man, especially his own relative, or he was so lost in his head he simply didn’t notice the train approaching. I’m leaning more towards the suicide with the evidence of his hands outstretched like a bird.
With the help of her almost-lover, Francine heads away into the French countryside to get away from everything that happened. Her parents are deep in grieving that their son has passed away, and she needs to unwind the trauma and depression caused by two deaths before it ends up affecting her, too.
At first, time in the town is idyllic. She talks to people on the beach, and discovers how the town basically shuts down once the month’s over because the tourists dry up in the colder months.
But tragedy seems to follow Francine wherever she goes. She spots a man trying to swim and show off in the water, and thinks nothing of it. As it turns out, she discovers later the same man’s body is found. He has drowned in the same act she kind of figured he was showing off during.
She is pinned as a witness and grilled by the townspeople as to why she didn’t say anything when she saw this originally. Now ostracized by that town, Francine returns to the hotel where the owner tells her she is no longer welcome there.
So Francine heads home without telling anyone. She stays with one of the farm employees for a couple of nights, then returns home to her parents and lover. He is obviously pissed that she spent time with another man, although they were not intimate, and they confess their love to each other. They decide to get married, which makes her parents so happy, and the novel ends with her kind of coming to terms with what had happened.
Overall Thoughts
I enjoyed this little novel. It’s very brief, clocking in at under two hundred pages, but I think it got its points across very well. Francine is a character in flux and dealing with the complications of tragedies in her life, and when she tries to escape from it, she ends up finding herself in the same exact cycles.
It’s very easy to feel trapped and make the cycles even worse at these points of one’s life, but it seems like the decisions she ends up making will put her in a better situation. I think there’s a lot of value in reading perspectives like these, as she is not a privileged girl at all.
This won’t be a novel for everyone, though—I can see how some people might not like the fact there isn’t much plot to this throughout. It’s a girl struggling through her emotions after the core events have happened, and some might enjoy that, while others might want more from a book like this.
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