The English-language debut of the late French author's second novel reinforces her revival — and her influence on women writing with brutal frankness.
Yes, awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion, is a political move. But it’s also a victory for literature.” She survived World War II by working for Vichy book censors by day and the French Resistance at night. Her husband was sent to Buchenwald. In addition to her novels, Duras wrote screenplays, stories and plays and directed more than a dozen films. But none of this touches on my favorite writing of hers.
“The Lover ” tells the story of a white Frenchwoman looking back on her teenage romance with an older Asian man. Despite its title, the novel is not a love story, but a meditation on the passage of time. Duras scoffed at the popularity of the book and its film adaptation: “It’s an airport novel,” she said. “I wrote it when I was drunk.”
Duras’ 1964 novel, “The Ravishing of Lol Stein,” also explores a woman’s obsession over the loss of a man. Lol is jilted by her fiancé at a ball, goes mad, then returns to her hometown, where she meets the lover of her married best friend. Though Lol acts interested by the sexual exploits of her friend and her lover, what she’s really excited by is the opportunity to rewrite her abandonment.
In “The Cost of Living,” Levy quotes Duras as saying that in writing “Lol Stein,” she “gave herself permission to speak in a sense totally alien to women.” Anyone who has read it knows that Duras is intrigued by the people we are, the people we see in the mirror and the people we’ve been. The clues in her nonfiction are bread crumbs on the way to understanding her fiction, but more delightfully, they are about what it means to write, particularly as women.
“The Easy Life” bears all these hallmarks. Francine is a young woman who lives on a farm in France. The book opens as she watches her uncle stumble home, mortally wounded from a fight with her brother. After a series of unfortunate events, Francine decamps to a hotel, where for the first time she becomes aware of her own existence, her own body, the beating of her heart.
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