Alongside the recounting of panicked hospital visits, scary infections, and breathing-tube struggles, there are comic riffs and asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a Delaney standup set, or on his Twitter feed. “A Heart That Works” tells the story of Henry’s life and Delaney’s grief. He spent much of his life in hospitals, and died before he turned three. Shortly after Delaney’s son Henry turned one, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. What effect does all this have on our systems? No one knows, but, as a researcher at England’s University of Portsmouth tells Simon, “We desperately need to find out.”
Microfibres can get pulled deep into the lungs. Many of the chemicals involved in the manufacture of plastics are carcinogens these chemicals can leak as plastics fall apart. The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract the risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Researchers have even found microplastics in human placentas. Clothes made with plastics, which now comprise most items for sale, are constantly shedding fibres. As tires roll along, they abrade, sending clouds of plastic particles spinning into the air. Plastic bags drift into the ocean, where they fall apart. “But with plastic we’ve contaminated every corner of Earth.” He is particularly concerned about plastic’s tendency to devolve into microplastics. “Without plastic we’d have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down,” Simon, a science journalist at Wired, writes. “Despite the obvious talents of its author,” one reviewer wrote, the over-all effect was “a bit thin.” And yet “The Easy Life” is constructed with the same torqued intensity as all her fiction, seeding the problems that will eventually become Durassian preoccupations: the anguish of poverty, the vertigo of young love, the pull of biological conformity, and the struggle of women to reconcile the requirements of feminine competence with the disorganizing effects of sexual desire. The book sold out on its first printing, but its critical reception was lukewarm. In a style differing from the bald obliquity that characterizes Duras’s more famous books and films, feelings and adjectives stick together like plums that have fallen from a tree and formed a putrid mass. Here, Duras’s sentences assume a voluptuousness that Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan do a remarkable job of translating. “La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel-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.
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