“La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel-now 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. “You can spend your whole life tidying life up,” she writes. “This obsessive orderliness, both in space and in time, was more or less of the kind she desired, not quite but almost.” It is toward this kind of catastrophe-what happens when a woman’s passion is scoured away-that Duras’s writing is repeatedly drawn. In “ The Ravishing of Lol Stein” (1964), a book about a stifled housewife driven to the far shores of madness by unrequited desire, the hot, anarchic force of Lol’s sexuality is sublimated to “the icy order” of her home. Like “doing a balancing act over death,” domestic work defends against the household disasters (adultery, mental breakdown, murder) that structure so many of her works.

Keeping a house, Duras explains in “ Practicalities” (1987), is an endless struggle to impose order on the chaos of everyday experience.

She felt strongly that the Spanish were wrong about gazpacho, which should be made with water, not broth, and despite her hellacious drinking and prolific output (more than fifty novels, plays and films) she made sure that the shelves of her country home were stocked with the necessities: wine, potatoes, butter, oil, garlic, insulating tape, steel wool, and nuoc mam. She made her name writing about the agonies of her own eros in ruthless, blanched sentences-and yet she could also knit socks, sew a set of pajamas, and repair a lamp. The story of the great French modernist Marguerite Duras is rarely told as a tale of household management, despite her obvious talent for it.

The ravishing of lol v stein