Published in 1944 when the author was 30, The Easy Life was Marguerite Duras’s second novel. Thanks to co-translators Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, it is now appearing in English for the first time, nearly 80 years later. Very few of Duras’s works have remained untranslated for so long, which poses the obvious question of why. Was the delay simply a product of happenstance? Or is this early novel not very good?

Read the full article in Review 31, available online here.