lokroma reviewed Easy Life by Emma Ramadan
Review of 'Easy Life' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Tiene...took me by the waist in a corner of the large living room. He told me "You'll also have to become kind and beautiful." And he smiled along with me. The two of us, we knew why.
This elegiac coming of age story will be familiar to most women...the struggle to stay within the patriarchal and the familiar against the need to break out, to be independent and alive. Francine wants to leave the farm where she lives in rural France, but craves its familiarity and preset roles for her at the same time. She struggles with boredom, chaos, and violence, and her desire to live and also to die. In the end she does what women have always done: she makes the choice to exert her power within the familiar.
The story, short on plot, is saturated with death, both actual and metaphysical, and Francine's detachment from two of …
Tiene...took me by the waist in a corner of the large living room. He told me "You'll also have to become kind and beautiful." And he smiled along with me. The two of us, we knew why.
This elegiac coming of age story will be familiar to most women...the struggle to stay within the patriarchal and the familiar against the need to break out, to be independent and alive. Francine wants to leave the farm where she lives in rural France, but craves its familiarity and preset roles for her at the same time. She struggles with boredom, chaos, and violence, and her desire to live and also to die. In the end she does what women have always done: she makes the choice to exert her power within the familiar.
The story, short on plot, is saturated with death, both actual and metaphysical, and Francine's detachment from two of those deaths is very disturbing. It's unclear to me why she distances herself...she is sorting out her place in the world and perhaps that involves trying to understand the meaning of life and death?
This was written during WWII and although Francine's choice may have been typical of its time, I was annoyed that after she went to stay by the sea for a couple of weeks she opted to return to the farm. I wanted her to go off on her own and leave the insular and suffocating life of Le Brugues behind.
The Easy Life was Duras' second novel, published in 1944, but only translated into English for the first time in 2022. Her writing is very beautiful and has an elusive, dreamlike quality that makes you feel you know what she is saying even if you can't quite parse it.
