Moderato Cantabile

Cultural Writing. Latino/Latina Studies. Fiction. Perhaps the most admired of all Marguerite Duras’s novels, MODERATO CANTABILE is almost a twentieth-century MADAME BOVARY in its picture of the dissatisfied wife of a rich provincial industrialist, who forms an attachment to one of her husband’s workmen. This is not the normal chronicle of adultery but a carefully woven tapestry of emotion. A haunting, oblique love story, it perfectly demonstrates the Duras technique of associating human emotion with locales and landscapes, and of describing longing, loneliness and love through references to weather, temperature, the color of the sky and the sound of the sea.