Recommendations
Books Like Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia by Marguerite Duras
Books for readers who loved the Italian summer heat and Duras's early portrait of bored bourgeois desire
Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) is Duras's most sensory and conventionally narrative early novel — a group of French tourists on the Italian coast, the heat, the boredom, and a brief affair that flares and passes. These 8 books share its atmosphere of saturated summer desire, its ensemble of people who know each other too well, and its portrait of adultery as a small, precise disturbance in a comfortable life.
- 1
Buy on AmazonModerato cantabile
by Marguerite Duras
The next Duras to read — shows where the author went after the relative accessibility of Les Petits Chevaux; the style that became her signature.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Talented Mr. Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
A young American among the Italian rich — the thriller version of the same sensory Italian summer world that Les Petits Chevaux inhabits, with the same boredom and desiring restlessness but with murder as the outcome.
- 3
Buy on AmazonOn the Road
by Jack Kerouac
The American counterpart of the same saturated present-moment consciousness — where Duras's characters are trapped by bourgeois comfort, Kerouac's characters escape from it, but both novels are about the desire to be more alive than ordinary life permits.
- 4
Buy on AmazonTender is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
American expatriates on the French Riviera, the same heat and sea and idleness and social erosion — the American modernist predecessor to the world Les Petits Chevaux inhabits.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Ripple Effect
by Patricia Highsmith
Highsmith's stories of Americans in Europe — the same expatriate summer world, the same sense of people whose comfortable lives contain a dangerous restlessness.
- 6
Buy on AmazonBonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan
Published the following year — the same Côte d'Azur summer world of French bourgeois leisure, desire, and manipulation, with a younger narrator and a sharper moral edge.
- 7
Buy on AmazonMy Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
The Neapolitan novel's Italian coastal summers — a different class setting but the same saturated sensory presence of heat, sea, and desire that Duras achieves in Les Petits Chevaux.
- 8Buy on Amazon
A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
English tourists in Italy, liberated from convention by the warmth and beauty of Tuscany — the Edwardian British predecessor to the same experience of northern Europeans loosened by the Italian south.
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