Marguerite Duras was a literary phenomenon. To scroll through her bibliography is to pull up a mass of novels, stories, plays, screenplays, in a creative lifespan from 1943 until her death in 1996. In The Easy Life, the first English translation of her second novel, published in France in 1944, the quintessential Duras tone is already here – stripped-down staccato sentences, remorseless introspection.

Duras is best known today for The Lover, a novel written when she was 70; a fictional version of her own youthful love affair in French Indochina (today’s Vietnam) with a Chinese Vietnamese man, it won the Prix Goncourt and was made into a successful film. Duras often plundered her own life for subject matter: in The Easy Life she turns to the remote village in south-east France from which her father had come and which she had visited as a teenager. And it features one of the compelling themes of Duras’s own life: her passionate attachment to a brother who died young, a year before she wrote the novel.

The Easy Life centres on an isolated farming family: parents, son Nicolas, daughter-in-law Clémence, daughter Francine the narrator, and lodger/farmhand Tiène. A seventh incumbent, uncle Jérôme, is disposed of in the first few pages, killed in a fight with Nicolas. With this first death the climate is established of a ménage fraught with resentment, suspicion and betrayal. Jérôme was responsible for the family’s departure in disgrace from an earlier prosperous town life; he had been sleeping with Clémence. Francine, who is a participant but also the detached observer, is in love with Tiène, the lodger. So, a nicely dysfunctional family, and the backdrop for Francine’s narrative, which fills out past and present in the pared-down Duras style.

It seems that the editor at Gallimard who took on The Easy Life had his doubts, complaining of “a muddled narrative” and “lack of control”. Part One is eventful, kicking off with the fight, and a death, and then dipping around in time as Francine recounts what is going on at the farm, and why – why Nicolas married Clémence, the “stupid and ugly” servant girl; why he now consorts with beautiful Luce Barragues from the nearby village; why Tiène is so firmly established in the household. Why – above all – the family has washed up there in such straightened circumstances.

All this is effectively done. There is urgency and precision to the writing; Nicolas, Tiène, Luce and Francine herself are intriguing and credible characters. The style may be clipped, but the setting and lifestyle are slipped into the action. There is mention of sheep, of two cows; work with potatoes, tobacco, beans, wheat. The men are always hard at it by day, vanishing from the farmhouse out into the fields, the landscape of crops, woodland, a river where a family picnic takes place, in a seminal scene of emotional tension between Nicolas, Luce, Tiène and Francine. The parents are somewhat sidelined, though it is made clear that Francine is devoted to her mother. The action is designed to focus on the four young people, and does so with unexpected drama, so that the narrative of Part Two switches at once to a different key, a new complexity.

Francine is now desolate, mired in grief. She takes off for a seaside resort she has always wanted to visit – at 25, she has hardly known anything but the claustrophobia of home. She books herself into a boarding house for two weeks, and the reader is treated to a prolonged monologue of introspection, broken into occasionally by further accounts of the family’s decline into its present malaise. But mainly this challenging section is an opaque commentary on Francine’s own self-absorption. You read passages again and again to tease out the meaning: “I look at my knees or my breasts that lift my dress and immediately my thought curves and returns to me, obedient. I think of myself. My knees real knees my breasts real breasts. An observation that counts.” This mannered style of deliberate abstraction can seem in one paragraph merely pretentious, and then serve up a line that is illuminating and accurate.

There is more to come, as Francine makes a clandestine return to the farm, still tormented by thoughts of past events and relationships. The ending is unexpected, and feels arbitrary: you remember the comments of that Gallimard editor. But Duras was only 30 when this novel was published. This is the writing of her youth, experimental in every sense, a precursor indeed of the sparse later style for which she was distinguished, but perhaps without its precision. And there is a significant cumulative effect. The writing creates an effective climate for the story; it has energy and self-sufficiency that nicely convey the claustrophobia and sexual tension of the group and the place. Francine can irritate, but she is also a persuasive narrator. Eight decades on, Duras’s nascent talent is on display here.

• Penelope Lively’s Metamorphosis: Selected Stories is published by Fig Tree. The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras, translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.