“Without plastic we’d have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down,” Simon, a science journalist at Wired, writes. “Despite the obvious talents of its author,” one reviewer wrote, the over-all effect was “a bit thin.” And yet “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. The book sold out on its first printing, but its critical reception was lukewarm. In a style differing from the bald obliquity that characterizes Duras’s more famous books and films, feelings and adjectives stick together like plums that have fallen from a tree and formed a putrid mass.
Here, Duras’s sentences assume a voluptuousness that Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan do a remarkable job of translating.
“La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel-translated into English as “ The Easy Life”-is a coming-of-age story that dwells on what a young woman must relinquish to the activity of tidying up life.
