It Is Marguerite She Mourns For : EMILY L. <i> by Marguerite Duras translated by Barbara Bray (Pantheon Books: $14.95; 112 pp.; 0-394-57233-5) </i>

By Trish Deitch Rohrer

April 30, 1989 12 AM PT

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“Emily L.,” written by the acclaimed French writer Marguerite Duras and translated by Barbara Bray, is a short and odd experimental novel--a story within a story--about a French writer and her longtime lover who sit in a cafe in a port town off the Seine and imagine the life history of an aging English couple they’ve never met, who are sitting across the room from them getting unhappily drunk. By the end of the novel it seems clear that the story the French writer and her lover imagine is, in some way, the story of their own life together.

What’s experimental or different about “Emily L.” is this: The story that’s imagined, that is, the life story of the aging English couple, is a traditional love story, complete with parents who forbid the lovers to marry, poems burned in a fire, an endless and exotic journey around the world in a sailing vessel, betrayal, new, unrequited love, and then, in the end, two lovers nearing death, drunk and despondent in a cafe bar far from home in a port town off the Seine.

The story that isn’t imagined--that is, the more immediate story that is being told by the French writer about an evening she and her lover spent in a cafe in a port town off the Seine imagining the life story of the drunken English couple--is not at all traditional. It’s a kind of autobiographical memoir--meandering and cerebral--about Duras’ feelings and thoughts in the moment while she sits at a table in a familiar and comfortable cafe with her mate.

What makes this book original is the melding of these two forms: the traditional, fictional narrative and what is essentially a present-tense memoir--one where the author talks about her love of a place (the cafe and its environs), her deep though ambivalent feelings about her mate, her despair (largely fueled by her early experiences growing up in the French colonies of Siam during the war) and her raison d’etre , her writing.

What Duras has most neatly and cleverly accomplished in writing “Emily L.” is a demonstration of how she--an established and well-regarded fiction writer--transforms real experience (that is, the thoughts, feelings, perceptions and memories written about in the non-traditional, autobiographical frame of the book) into fiction (the traditional love story about the aging English couple). Literarily-- academically --speaking, then, “Emily L.” is a gem.

But if you’re looking for some other--less noble--pleasure in reading, you won’t find it here. I didn’t find “Emily L.” at all entertaining. The writing is spare and economical, and it’s often pretty, but it seems slow to the point of static, and convoluted. The sentences seem more often than not like conversations overheard but not quite understood. Here’s an example:

“More people arrived and went straight into the hotel restaurant.

“You said, ‘She must feel the power within her like a kind of lost intelligence that’s no use to her anymore.

“ ‘And like some terrible flaw she acquired from outside her own life, she doesn’t know when or how, or from whom or what?

“ ‘Some flaw deep inside her that she’s kept silent about all her life, so as to stay where she wanted to be--in the barren regions of her love for the Captain.’ ”

In 1950, Duras published a novel--her third--called “The Sea Wall,” about an impoverished and ignorant young woman living in the French colonies in Siam, who takes advantage of a rich and lonely Chinese man very much in love with her. The novel, a straight narrative with a conventional beginning, middle and end, is passionate, messy, overlong and utterly readable. And in 1984, Duras published “The Lover,” which won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in France and was a best seller in the United States. “The Lover” is essentially the same story as “The Sea Wall,” but told from a more mature, more forgiving point of view (in “The Lover,” the young French woman from the colonies is as much in love with the rich Chinese man as he is with her, and the wounds that are suffered on account of their affair seem more profound and more tragic). It’s a short, lean, beautiful book, economical yet fully passionate and thoughtful.

“Emily L.” is, in many ways, the same story told again, but this time with the maturity of Duras’ 75 years behind it. It’s a knowing, accepting sort of book, but its characters are weary. And there’s something in that weariness that has insinuated itself into the writing, I’m afraid. Where Duras had learned an economy of craft and style in “The Lover,” she’s now taken that economy and created a book that is so spare, and so without youthful, active passion, that it seems almost to lack a physicality, a sensuousness that helps the reader take hold of the book and hang on.

“Emily L.” is a lovely book in many ways--not lacking in depth, complexity, wisdom, or beauty--but it’s not for everyone.