Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia Reading Order

Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 1953) by Marguerite Duras is one of her early novels, written before the radical minimalism of Moderato cantabile, and one of the most readable and emotionally direct of all her works. Set on the Italian coast — a group of French tourists are spending a lazy, bored summer at a seaside village near the Etruscan site of Tarquinia — the novel follows Sara, a married woman with a small child, as she is drawn into a flirtation and then a brief love affair with Gino, a younger Italian man. The group dynamic — the heat, the boredom, the small dramas of friendship and desire between people who have known each other too long — is rendered with great vividness, and the novel has a quality of saturated sensory presence (the heat, the sea, the wine, the particular smell of the seaside) that is unusual in Duras's work. The 'little horses of Tarquinia' are the Etruscan terracotta horses in the nearby museum — beautiful, delicate, and ancient — which provide the novel's only external reference point and function as an emblem of the fragility of what the characters experience. Les Petits Chevaux is often overlooked in favour of the more radical later Duras, but it is an enormously pleasurable novel and a good introduction to her work for readers who want to approach her through a more conventional narrative structure.