Reading Order
Moderato cantabileModerato cantabile Reading Order
Moderato cantabile (1958) by Marguerite Duras is the novel at the intersection of the nouveau roman and the literary existentialism of the postwar period — a novella of eight scenes in which Anne Desbaresdes, a bourgeois woman in a provincial port town, returns again and again to a café near the scene of a crime of passion (a woman has been killed by her lover in the café), initiating conversations with a workman named Chauvin about what might have happened between the woman and the man. The novel is both a psychoanalytic investigation (what is Anne's desire for the murdered woman's experience?) and a study of class (the bourgeois woman drawn to the café world she is excluded from by her position) and a musical composition (the title refers to a piano instruction: 'moderately, with singing quality'). Duras's prose in Moderato cantabile has the quality of repetition, silence, and ellipsis that would characterize all her major work — it anticipates the style of Le Vice-consul (1966), L'Amante anglaise (1967), and L'Amour (1971).
Where to start
Read Moderato cantabile in one sitting — it is very short (under 120 pages) and the repetition of the eight scenes requires continuous reading to feel the accumulating obsession. Then read Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) for the earlier autobiographical novel; L'Amant (1984) for the late autobiographical masterpiece; and Hiroshima mon amour (1960, the screenplay for Alain Resnais's film) for the expansion of Duras's cinema-literature boundary work.
Complete Moderato cantabile Book List
- 1Buy
Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras·1958·Start here — read in one sitting; the eight scenes and the repetition are the meaning; very short - 2Buy
Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras·1950·The Sea Wall — the autobiographical Indochina novel; the mother and the dam; read for the earlier realist Duras - 3Buy
L'Amant
Marguerite Duras·1984·The Lover — the Prix Goncourt autobiographical novel; the definitive account; the most widely read Duras; read after Moderato - 4Buy
Hiroshima mon amour
Marguerite Duras·1960·The Resnais film screenplay — Duras at the cinema-literature boundary; the French woman and the Japanese architect; essential companion - 5Buy
Le Vice-consul
Marguerite Duras·1966·The Vice-Consul — the late major novel; Calcutta and Lahore; the beggar woman and the mad consul; read last
Moderato cantabile — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the crime of passion in Moderato cantabile?
At the novel's opening, a man has killed his lover in a café. The killing is presented as an act of passionate desire — the woman asked to be killed, the man killed her. Anne Desbaresdes witnesses the aftermath; her obsession with the dead woman and with the nature of the crime drives the novel's eight scenes. What the crime 'means' is never explained — Duras refuses the psychological explanation; the crime is presented as a fact, an extreme form of erotic and fatal love, which Anne's conversations with Chauvin are attempting to understand, or rather to approach without understanding.
Who is Chauvin and what is his relationship with Anne?
Chauvin is a worker — he used to work in the factory of Anne's husband, has been dismissed, and now drinks in the café near the scene of the crime. His relationship with Anne is the novel's central ambiguity: they meet repeatedly in the café and construct, through their conversations about the crime, a fantasy of what might have happened between the dead woman and her killer — and in constructing this fantasy, they are also, obliquely, constructing a relationship between themselves. Whether anything actually happens between Anne and Chauvin is left unclear; their conversations have an erotic charge that never arrives at any explicit event.
What does 'moderato cantabile' mean?
'Moderato cantabile' is a musical instruction — moderately, in a singing quality — that the child (Anne's son) is playing in his piano lesson in the opening scene. The instruction is repeated several times by the piano teacher (who represents the cultural values from which Anne is trying to escape) and has a double function in the novel: it describes the tempo and quality of Anne's approach to the obsessive truth she is circling, and it names the piano-like structure of the novel itself — eight scenes that repeat with variations, with silences, with a quality of musical rather than narrative development.
How does Moderato cantabile relate to Duras's other work?
Moderato cantabile is transitional in Duras's career — it comes after the relatively conventional early novels (Un barrage contre le Pacifique, 1950) and before the most extreme formal experiments (L'Amour, 1971; Le Camion, 1977). The elliptical, repetitive prose style that Moderato cantabile establishes becomes the signature of all Duras's major late work. L'Amant (1984) uses a similar style but applies it to explicitly autobiographical material; Hiroshima mon amour (1960) applies it to the film form; Le Vice-consul (1966) and India Song (1975) develop the Indian setting. Moderato cantabile is the first fully realized version of the Durassian literary voice.
What is Duras's relationship to the nouveau roman?
Duras is associated with the nouveau roman but belongs to it only partially. She shares the movement's rejection of conventional psychology, conventional narrative causality, and the omniscient author; her prose has the ellipsis and silence characteristic of the movement. But Duras is always more interested in desire, loss, and obsessive love than the more formal Robbe-Grillet or Butor; her novels have an emotional and autobiographical dimension that the purest nouveau roman rejects. The easiest way to locate Duras: she is between the nouveau roman and Marguerite Yourcenar — more experimental than Yourcenar, more personal than Robbe-Grillet.
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