Recommendations
Books Like Moderato cantabile by Marguerite Duras
Novels of obsession, desire, and what cannot be spoken
Moderato cantabile circles an unspeakable obsession — a bourgeois woman and a workman constructing, conversation by conversation, a fantasy they can never name. These novels share the same elliptical approach to the unspeakable at the center of desire.
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Buy on AmazonL'Amant
by Marguerite Duras
The Lover — Duras's Prix Goncourt autobiographical novel; the definitive account of her Indochina childhood and first erotic relationship; the most widely read Duras
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Buy on AmazonHiroshima mon amour
by Marguerite Duras
The Resnais film screenplay — a French woman and a Japanese architect in Hiroshima; Duras applying her elliptical style to the cinema form
- 3Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The nouveau roman founding text — the same orientation toward what moves beneath the surface of social interaction that Duras reaches through obsession and repetition
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A Passion
by Peter Handke
The Austrian writer's investigation of desire and obsession through formal experiment — the shared European postwar project of reaching what conventional fiction cannot say
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Buy on AmazonThe Lover
by Marguerite Duras
The English translation of L'Amant — for English readers, the translation is excellent and the essential Duras companion to Moderato cantabile
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Buy on AmazonLa Jalousie
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Jealousy — the nouveau roman's most sustained investigation of obsessive watching; Robbe-Grillet's geometric precision is the formal counterpart to Duras's ellipsis
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Buy on AmazonIndia Song
by Marguerite Duras
Duras's film-text hybrid — the same Calcutta colonial world as Le Vice-consul; voices and images from a remembered past; the most experimental of her late works
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Buy on AmazonUn barrage contre le Pacifique
by Marguerite Duras
The Sea Wall — Duras's earlier, more conventional autobiographical novel; the Indochina childhood material in realistic form before the spare late style
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