Marguerite wasn’t always Duras. She was born Donnadieu, but with the publication of her first novel, “Les Impudents,” in 1943, she went from Donnadieu to Duras and stayed that way. She chose, as her alias, the village of her father’s origins, distancing herself from her family, and binding herself to the emanations of that place name, which is pronounced with a regionally southern French preference for a sibilant “S.” The village of Duras is in Lot-et-Garonne, an area south of the Dordogne and just north of Gascony. The language of Gascon, from which this practice of a spoken “S” derives, is not considered chic. More educated French people not from the region might be tempted to opt for a silent “S” with a proper name. In English, one hears a lot of “dur-ah”—especially from Francophiles. Duras herself said “dur-asss,” and that’s the correct, if unrefined, way to say it.

Marcel Proust, whom Duras admired a great deal and reread habitually, modelled the compelling and ridiculous Baron de Charlus on Robert de Montesquiou, of Gascony. Some argue that on account of Montesquiou’s origins and for the simpler reason that Charlus, here, is a place name, it should be pronounced “charlusss.” In “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Proust himself makes quite a bit of fun of the issue of pronunciations, and how they signify class and tact, and specifically, the matter of an “S,” of guessing if it’s silent or sibilant. Madame de Cambremer–Legrandin experiences a kind of rapture the first time she hears a proper name without the sibilant “S”—Uzai instead of Uzès—and suddenly the silent “S,” “a suppression that had stupefied her the day before, but which it now seemed so vulgar not to know,” becomes the proof, and apotheosis, of a lifetime of good breeding.

So vulgar not to know, and yet what Proust is really saying is that it’s equally vulgar to be so conscious of élite significations, even as he was entranced by the world of them. Madame de Cambremer-Legrandin is, after all, a mere bourgeois who elevated her station through marriage, and her self-conscious, snobbish silent “S” will never change that, and can only ever be a kind of striving, made touchingly comical in “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Duras is something else. No tricks, full “S.” Maybe, in part, her late-life and notorious habit of referring to herself in the third person was a reminder to say it the humble way, “dur-asss.” Or maybe it was just an element of what some labelled her narcissism, which seems like a superficial way to reject a genius. Duras was consumed with herself, true enough, but almost as if under a spell. Certain people experience their own lives very strongly. Regardless, there is a consistent quality, a kind of earthy simplicity, in all of her novels, films, plays, screenplays, notebooks, and in the dreamily precise oral “telling” of “La Vie Matérielle,” which is a master index of Durassianisms, of “S”-ness: lines that function on boldness and ease, which is to say, without pretension.

“There is one thing I’m good at, and that’s looking at the sea.”

“When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child.”

“Alcohol is a substitute for pleasure though it doesn’t replace it.”

“A man and a woman, say what you like, they’re different.”

“A life is no small matter.”

Her assertions have the base facticity of soil and stones, even if one doesn’t always agree with them, especially not with her homophobia, which gets expressed in the section of “La Vie Matérielle” on men, and seems to have gotten worse as her life fused into a fraught and complicated autumn-spring intimacy with Yann Andrea Steiner, who was gay.

“La Vie Matérielle” was translated as “Practicalities” by Barbara Bray, but might be more felicitously titled “Material Life,” or “Everyday Life.” The book began as recordings of Duras speaking to her son’s friend Jérôme Beaujour. After the recordings were transcribed, there was much reworking and cutting and reformulating by Duras. In terms of categories, the book is unique, but all of Duras’s writing is novelistic in its breadth and profundity, and all of it can be poured from one flask to another, from play to novel to film, without altering its Duras-ness. In part, this is because speech and writing are in some sense the same thing with Duras. When she talks, she is writing, and when writing, speaking. (Some of her later work was spoken first to Yann Andrea, who typed her sentences, and the results were novels, such as “The Malady of Death.”) The English-edition flap copy describes “La Vie Matérielle” as “about being an alcoholic, about being a woman, and about being a writer.” And it is about those things, and more or less in that order, although drinking is woven throughout. Her discussions of it are blunt. They are also accurate, and spoken by one who knows. When Duras made this book, in 1987, she had suffered late-stage cirrhosis and lost her mind in a detox clinic, an episode she refers to, in the book, as a “coma.” She’d quit, started, quit. Later, in 1988, she was in a real coma, for five months. “It’s always too late when people tell someone they drink too much,” she writes. “You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.”

Her talk of women and domestic life are of her era, although she was her own sort of early feminist, who felt that pregnancy was proof of women’s superiority to men, which she constantly reminded the men around her while pregnant with her son Jean. In a section called “House and Home,” she provides a list of important items with which she stocked Neauphle-le-Château, the country place where she wrote, and where many of her films were made. The list includes butter, coffee filters, steel wool, fuses, and Scotch-Brite. Only frivolous women, she says, neglect repairs. For the “rough” work that men do, in counterpart to domestic chores, she is unimpressed: “To cut down trees after a day at the office isn’t work, it’s a kind of game.” And even worse, she adds, a man thinks he’s a hero if he goes out and buys a couple of potatoes. “Still, never mind,” she finishes off, and in the next paragraph announces that people tell her that she exaggerates, but that women could use a bit of idealizing. From there she is on to the burning of manuscripts, which make the house feel virginal and clean, and her next topic, rolled into seamlessly, is the phenomenon of “sales, super sales, and final reductions” that drive a woman to purchase clothing she does not want or need. She ends up with a sartorial excess, a surplus, new to her generation, and yet this ur-woman, a figment of typicality, maintains the same role, in the home and in the world, that has persisted for all women in all times: a “theatre of profound loneliness that has constituted their lives for centuries.”

Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the nineteen-fifties, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these as insults! (This phenomenon, sadly, has not gone away, even now, in 2017.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, the tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”