Marguerite Duras

For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside. The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence. An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

The Easy Life

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within an order that does not feel, we are this insignificant disorder that feels

Each day I could die but never do I die. Each day I think I know more than yesterday, just enough to die. I forget that yesterday it was the same story. Never do I die. And yet I know now: how moments announce themselves, approach, arrive, and envelop us for an instant in their whirlwind, how they collapse as soon as we abandon them for another impending moment. Cathedrals of wind.

The Easy Life quotes

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