Moderato cantabile Reading Order

Moderato cantabile (1958) by Marguerite Duras is one of the most concentrated novels in the French language: one hundred pages that trace a series of meetings between Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of a factory director in a provincial port town, and Chauvin, a former worker at her husband's factory, over the days following a murder that takes place in a café below her son's piano lesson. The novel begins with that murder — a man shoots a woman in the café, apparently at the woman's own request — and Anne and Chauvin spend the subsequent meetings reconstructing, in obsessive and fragmented conversation, what the murdered couple's relationship might have been, what the woman might have wanted, what the man might have felt. The reconstruction is also, gradually and unmistakably, a mirror for what is happening between Anne and Chauvin themselves — a desire that they cannot name directly but that they circle around with the same obsessive repetition as the piano exercise the title refers to. Duras's prose in Moderato cantabile is stripped to an almost inhuman sparseness: the dialogue is flat, the description is minimal, the emotional temperature is maintained almost entirely through repetition and silence. The novel is one of the foundational texts of the Nouveau Roman movement, and it demonstrates better than almost any other book what the minimalist aesthetic can achieve: the evacuated surface that forces the reader to supply the emotion that the text refuses to provide.