Archive for the ‘Marguerite Duras’ Category

Abahn Sabana David

August 2, 2025

Abahn Sabana David is a 1970 novel by Marguerite Duras (though the translation, by Kazim Ali, is from 2016), its title originating from the three (or four) characters who spend the night together waiting for the arrival of Gringo who (in his absence) is portrayed as a powerful man not averse to using violence in the town of Staadt (‘stadt’ is, of course, German for city). Sabana and David arrive at the house of Abahn with instructions to watch Abahn until morning when Gringo will arrive:

“Gringo made a deal with the merchants. They told him, ‘If you let us sell to the Greeks then we’ll give you Abahn the Jew.’ Gringo agreed. The police sleep tonight. The town is Gringo’s.”

They describe themselves as being from “Gringo’s Party”. David carries a gun, its use threatened throughout the novel: according to Sabana, Abahn will “be dead at daybreak.” Just as they settle down to wait, another man appears, also called Abahn, and also a Jew:

“I was passing by. I saw someone crying. I came.”

Sabana and the second Abahn discuss the fate of the original Abahn, now referred to as “the Jew”. The geographical location of the novel is deliberately vague – there are references to the “Nazi gas chambers” (“There aren’t any gas chambers anymore”) but other remarks might make us think of Soviet Russia:

“No, here you get the labour camp or a quick death.”

Outside the house we hear the howling of dogs and, later, shots. (Dogs are a recurring element, from the insult “Jew-dog” to David’s desire to have the Jew’s dogs when he is dead). There are numerous references to a field, the “field of death”, where we assume previous corpses have been buried, as well as a forest. The character’s names seem deliberately wide-ranging: Abahn is Arabic, Sabana Spanish, and David Hebrew. We learn little about their backgrounds. David, we are told, is a stonemason and married to a woman named Jeanne who also belongs to Gringo’s Party. Sabana, who is older, lives with them. Of the reason for the Jew’s death, we are told only: “He was in the Party and he betrayed it.” But loyalties are fragile – Jeanne (Sabana tells the Jew) betrays Gringo by changing the words he asks her to write down (“Gringo told her to write down ‘criminal lies’ but she wrote down ‘criminal liberties’”):

“And one day they will kill her like they will kill you.”

The intensely suspicious atmosphere may well originate in Duras’ experience in the French resistance, during which time she joined the communist party. The novel certainly conveys a twisting web of loyalties and trust. In this is it aided by its pared back style, largely consisting of dialogue with description in short sentences, not unlike stage directions, used to set the scene. Duras was, of course, alternating between fiction and screenwriting at the time and there is little to differentiate the novel from a script apart from the layout.

More problematic is the novel’s use of Jewishness. It goes beyond antisemitic persecution to represent something wider, a more general tendency towards murder and victimisation which may (given when the novel was written) be equally linked to the Soviet Union and the invasion of Prague in 1968. Abahn is “the Jew” and a “Jew-dog” but the novel is not specifically about the treatment of Jews. In this way, Duras allows for a wider range of interpretations but risks diluting the complexity of the novel and the issues it tackles. 

Having said that, the novel’s power lies in its oblique intensity. The tangled conversations do eventually build to a climax and the ending is not what the reader might expect. While Abahn Sabana David is a particular kind of novel, one that has more in common with Beckett’s plays than most fiction, it draws the reader in to its claustrophobic environs and questions the sides we take, or even whether taking sides is possible.

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The Vice-Consul

August 25, 2024

Marguerite Duras’ The Vice-Consul was originally published in 1965 and quickly translated into English by Eileen Ellenbogen (1968). In the novel the lives of characters in various states of desperation coincide, an atmosphere intensified by the oppressive heat of the Indian setting. The Vice-Consul of Lahore is in Calcutta awaiting judgment after an act of violence that is at first kept from the reader. There he falls in love for the first time in his life with the wife of the French ambassador, Anne-Marie Stretter. His story is juxtaposed with that of a nameless beggar woman who is thrown out of her home when she falls pregnant, later gives the baby away, and now lives among the lepers of the city.

It is with the beggar that the novel begins, driven out of her home by her mother. Her wanderings at first seem to have direction, at least in her mind, but increasingly become aimless. When the baby is born a white woman takes her in and she immediately escapes, leaving the baby behind:

“The baby has been given. It has been received. It is done.”

The Biblical phraseology of her story is presented as the work of Peter Morgan (“She walks on, writes Peter Morgan”) rather than Duras herself. Morgan is a friend of Anne-Marie and we will later discover she has helped him with the story of the beggar woman, based on a woman who lives among the lepers of Calcutta. Distancing is function of Duras’ writing but here this further barrier absolves her of the difficulty of a white writer telling the story of an Asian woman. The story itself, for all its detail, takes on the aspect of a fable, and the character of the woman (and particularly a song she sings) could be said to haunt the white characters. (For example, when they go to the Prince of Wales Hotel, she follows them). Morgan represents a European view of India:

“Peter Morgan is young. He wants to shoulder the misery of Calcutta. He wants to plunge into its depths. He wants to do it now, to get it over with, so that wisdom may start to grow out of bitter experience.”

He sees India as a challenge but one from which he hopes to benefit; other characters admit the test, one which perhaps the Vice-Consul has failed. When we first meet the Vice-Consul, we are quickly introduced to the idea that his presence is awkward – Charles Rossett, new to India, “comes upon him so suddenly that, this time, he cannot avoid an encounter.” When he discovers that the Vice-Consul has been invited to a reception at the Embassy he is “scarcely able to conceal his astonishment.” The Ambassador tells Charles he expected the Vice-Consul to offer his resignation, but weeks have now passed since his arrival in Calcutta.

The reception at the Embassy takes up the central section of the novel. Much is made not only of the Vice-Consul’s presence but also whether Anne-Marie will dance with him as she traditionally does with all her male guests. Duras largely uses dialogue at this point, from the general “People are saying…” to the conversations taking place on the dance floor. It become increasingly clear that the Vice-Consul sees this as his opportunity to get close to Anne-Marie, both physically (by dancing with her) and emotionally:

“The look in the Vice-Consul’s eyes is painful to see. It is as though he were waiting for someone to show him kindness, even perhaps love.”

Much of the novel’s success revolves around the ambiguity of the Vice-Consul’s character. As readers, should we sympathise with the conformist character of Charles who seems placed to be the viewpoint we can identify with? Or, perhaps, the fear society feels at the Vice-Consul is a result of his sincerity? Anne-Marie will herself admit:

“…it’s hard for everyone at the beginning in Calcutta. I myself went through a period of intense depression.”

(Ther are rumours she attempted suicide). It is speculated that it was the suffering he saw that drove the Vice-Consul to act as he did in Lahore, and it is perhaps the sincerity of his love that means Anne-Marie must refuse him (as she takes a new lover every year). “He’s here, and he must live as best he can,” she tells her friends, admitting that only by adopting an emotionally distanced, cynical approach to life can she survive:

“I can only be the person I am here with you by… frittering away my time like this… don’t you see?”

The novel, therefore, can be read as a display of colonial attitudes, something Duras understood well, and something even the Vice-Consul finally accepts. It is another of Duras’ miniature masterpieces, now sadly out of print.

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Lost Books – The Sea Wall

December 18, 2023

Marguerite Duras’ third novel, The Sea Wall (also translated as A Sea of Troubles) was, for many years, the earliest of her works in English, published in 1950 and translated by Herma Briffault in 1952. Recent translations of her first (The Impudent Ones) and second (The Easy Life) novels means that this is no longer the case, but it still gives us an interesting insight into Duras’ early writing. The novel is set in French Indochina, and much of it is autobiographical with echoes of Duras’ life there with her mother in the 1920s after her father’s death. It focuses on one particular time when her mother invested in land which proved to be impossible to cultivate, reducing the family to poverty. Marguerite is represented by seventeen-year-old Suzanne; whereas Duras had two older brothers, Suzanne has only one, Joseph, whom she idolises.

The tone is set from the novel’s opening when Joseph discovers that the horse he bought a week previously to earn a little money carrying passengers in a carriole will not eat. His mother tells him, “the horse was like her, he was tired of living and simply wanted to give up and die.” An atmosphere of hopelessness surrounds the isolated house: Ma plants flowers which are regularly killed by drought; Joseph hunts for deer, sometimes nightly, gathering carcasses “which only had to be thrown away at the end of three days.” The major symbol of despair is the land itself which floods with seawater every year, killing any crop which has been planted. Even then, Ma does not give up:

“She was going to ask the natives who lived miserably on the adjacent lands to construct, with her, a barrier against the sea.”

Needless to say, the sea wall is a failure and collapses at the first tide. The family are reduced to eating seabirds and both Joseph and Suzanne long for escape. Into this poverty comes Monsier Jo, a wealthy young man whom the family meet at the canteen in Ram, the nearest town:

“Ma noticed the direction of his gaze and she, too, looked at her daughter.”

“Riches do not make happiness,” Jo tells them, but Suzanne disagrees: “I have a feeling we’d manage things so that money would make us happy.” Jo is not physically attractive, particularly to Suzanne who sees her brother as representing the masculine ideal (when Jo offers to take her for a drive in his car, she asks if Joseph can drive it), but his wealth makes him impossible to ignore. Duras highlights the contrast between Jo and Suzanne’s family as they recount all their problems to him in chorus while laughing, every so often interjecting, “if that was all, it wouldn’t be anything!” There is something uncomfortable in their attempt to make their poverty entertaining, yet also aggressive – at no point do they humble themselves before Jo.

The novel explores the relationship which develops. Ma and Suzanne are categorical that only marriage is an acceptable outcome, an aim entirely motivated by their financial situation:

“…the only way out for me is to marry my daughter off to that good-for-nothing.”

The relationship soon becomes one of exchange though that is neither Jo nor Suzanne’s intention. When she is showering, Jo asks that she open the door so he can see her: “at that very moment, Monsieur Jo talked about the phonograph.” She opens the door and the next day he brings the family a new phonograph. For Suzanne, Jo is like the sea wall, the horse that died: “He was not a person: he was only a misfortune.” She cannot dismiss him as he offers hope to her mother, but he represents a sacrifice on her part. For Jo, Suzanne is a young woman he can make no impression on:

“It’s like spitting into water… Nothing I do affects you, not even my best intentions.”

Duras is, of course, aware of Suzanne’s developing sexuality. Although she is initially repelled by the idea of Jo seeing her naked, she admits to herself “it was the natural desire of a man” –

“And there she was, worth seeing.”

The Sea Wall, is a complex but claustrophobic novel, exploring Suzanne’s growing sense of herself as a woman, but in the context of the family’s poverty and despair. At times, the world, like the sea, seems determine to wash way all hope. Duras (as in The Easy Life) is very good on what it means to be poor, both practically and spiritually. In the end, the story is perhaps less Suzanne’s or Joseph’s than it is Ma’s, whose years of struggle form the backdrop to her children’s lives.

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The Easy Life

June 21, 2023

The Easy Life is Marguerite Duras’ previously untranslated second novel, originally published in 1944 and now available in English thanks to Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan. According to Kate Zambreno in her introduction, Raymond Queneau described it as a “muddled narrative” and it is true that the three parts do not feel entirely unified, yet they also contain some very fine writing. Its narrator, Francine, is a young woman in her mid-twenties who feels trapped on her parents’ farm, where her brother, Nicolas, her brother’s wife, Clemence, and her uncle Jerome also live. Jerome is largely to blame for their hand-to-mouth existence as, ten years ago, Florence’s father lost his job as burgomaster for taking money to pay Jerome’s debts. The novel opens after a fight between Nicolas and Jerome in which Jerome is fatally hurt; Florence must bear some of the blame as it was she who told Nicolas that Jerome was sleeping with Clemence:

“Of course, I hadn’t wanted Nicolas to kill Jerome, just for Jerome to be chased away. But now I didn’t know what I had wanted exactly.”

Jerome takes nine days to die, his cries of pain haunting the house:

“His screams rose, muffled at first. It seemed like he was going to vomit himself whole in a thick lava, then from this foam finally emerged the real cry, pure, raw as a child’s.”

Time and again in this section Duras describes Francine experiencing the world through her senses – what she smalls, what she hears, what she sees – but rarely what she touches. “Maman’s hair always smells like vanilla,” she tells us; “I had in my ears the grinding screws” as her uncle’s coffin is closed. Yet in the moments when she touches others – Nicolas’ baby, Noel, her lover Tiene – it is stated blandly as action – “My body was numb,” she says at one point. In this way Duras emphasises the physical oppression of her circumstances while retaining a sense of isolation. When Clemence leaves without Noel, and the child begins to suckle Francine’s breast, she focuses on the sound rather than the feeling:

“The suction sound he made while suckling, so slight, revealed to me that I had a body that was still very young despite my thick and ancient fatigue.”

The contrast between her relative youth and her aged soul is also highlighted, a common theme in Duras’ work. “How could Tiene love me?” she wonders, “I felt a hundred years older.” This ancient feeling is not merely the result of a hard life, but something  more primal. As with her provocation of Nicolas (she tells Tiene “she hadn’t had any specific intention except to see Nicolas reach his limit”), she often acts instinctively, without fully understanding her own motives.

The novel’s first part ends in such as way as to suggest a conclusion, but Duras continues onto a second part where, Francine, alone, is sent by Tiene to the coast to rest. She feels further disassociated from herself, describing her life as “a fruit I must have eaten some of without tasting it, without realising it, distractedly.” While she is there an older man takes an interest in her, leading to an incident which could in itself have been a fine short story. The tone is much more meditative: Francine reflects on her mortality:

“For now, my death is a little beast inside me and we live together in perfect harmony.”

There is a long section on entering the sea which is clearly allegorical (“You must advance with the last of your power…”). However, Francine’s internal life remains a mystery to her:

“Although I do the same thing here every day… I am sometimes joyful for no reason; sometimes, also for no reason, I am ablaze with a black sadness from the morning on.”

The final part, in which Francine returns home, is the shortest, and designed to bring the two other parts together. It succeeds in doing so, but not entirely convincingly, perhaps because it does not feel as if Francine has changed. Having said that, The Easy Life thoroughly deserves its translation: from the bitter realism of the first part, to the more existential second, it heralds a unique voice.

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The Little Horses of Tarquinia

December 5, 2022

The Little Horses of Tarquinia is one of Marguerite Duras’ early novels, originally published in 1953 and translated into English by Peter DuBerg in 1960 for John Calder, and reprinted in 1985 (a newer translation seems to have been self-published in 2009). It takes place over only a few days during of summer in a Mediterranean village by a lake where a group of friends are holidaying. Sara and Jacques are there with their four-year-old child; Ludi and Gina are returning to the place where they meet twelve years before, and there is also the unattached Diana, as well as a newcomer, the man with a motorboat (Jean – but generally ‘the man’). The novel charts the tensions in its characters’ relationships, which they discuss obliquely without ever quite understanding each other. As Diana says, in one of many quotable lines:

“The worst thing of all is the way married people get to know one another.”

As is often the case with Duras, the atmosphere comes before the plot. We immediately learn that the weather is particularly hot, even for summer, and the characters frequently comment on how unbearable this is:

“The summer was hot all over Europe, but here everyone was completely crushed by it…”

At one point a forest fire is seen in the distance, but such is the lethargy created by the heat (but one suspects more deeply rooted than that) no one is unduly concerned. The atmosphere is also affected by a death – a man has been killed by a mine and his parents, having spent the last few days collecting pieces of his body, have still not left. The mother is refusing to sign the death certificate:

“The village was in mourning. Everyone was waiting of them to go.”

This acts a memento mori in the novel, and the friends often go to visit the couple, and the shopkeeper who has appointed himself their guardian. He talks about his dead wife whom he loved but who did not love him back:

“Death is always a sorrow, even after the worst of possible lives that people could have together.”

This adds another strand to Duras’ examination of relationships, and of faithfulness. Although Gina and Ludi’s marriage seems to be under the most stress, Gina declares, “When I’m with one man, I can’t do it with others at the same time.” Yet, they frequently argue, and we sense long-running resentments – for example Gina’s refusal to go to America with Ludi – which display themselves in more trivial actions, such as when Gian gives noodles aux vongole, Ludi’s favourite meal, to the old couple.

It is Sara, however, who is at the centre of the novel. “Ever since the moment he was born I’ve lived in a dream,” she says of her child, suggesting she cannot believe it is quite real rather that it is a ‘dream come true’. She does not demonstrate much affection for the boy, as the narrative highlights by using ‘the child’ throughout, and shares the care of him with the maid. The maid, however, has a lover whom she asks to see every night. The others often criticise the maid, and Diana wonders whether Sara really needs to give her every night off:

“The fact is you just want to avoid spending too many evenings with the rest of us.”

In fact, much of the time Sara simply seems not to want anything very definite. Much of the narrative tension revolves around whether she will have an affair with the man who owns the motorboat, but her reluctance to take risks is demonstrated in her attitude towards the sea:

“I’m terrified when I can’t touch bottom.”

As the man says to her, “You’re afraid. It isn’t that you don’t know how to swim.” Later he will encourage her to go out of her depth, though he also makes the point, after telling her he once fell asleep in the water, “It’s something that can’t be taught or I’d teach you.” Rather than being ruled by fear, Sara seems to lack the desire to overcome it – there is certainly no moral objection to sleeping with the man. Matters are complicated when Jacques decides to take a trip – the possibility of seeing the little horses of Tarquinia is mentioned. The trip feels like a provocation towards Sara to admit the affair. When she wants to put the trip off for a few days, he asks her to explain why, and then turns to the man: “What do you think of all this?” adding opaquely:

“I like to have things stated clearly.”

This is typical of the way the characters neither avoid sensitive topics nor talk openly but rather tackle their problems obliquely. The reader may care for neither for Sara nor Jacques – no matter how intimate we are with their feelings there is always a distance – but there is a fascination in observing their relationship, as there is with all the relationships here. This is Duras’ great skill as a novelist and why we should continue to read her.

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Whole Days in the Trees

April 19, 2022

Whole Days in the Trees by Marguerite Duras is a collection of short stories originally published in 1954 and translated by Anita Burrows in 1984. Duras was only forty in 1954 yet three out of the four stories concern characters who are older. In the title story Jacques is visited by his mother, a rich factory owner, in Paris where he lives with his lover, Marcelle, working as hosts in a nightclub. ‘The Boa’ features a young girl growing up in a French colony more typical of Duras’ writing, but the relationship described is with a female teacher who has never married, and it is filled with the regrets of age as well as the desires of youth. ‘Madame Dodin’ is perhaps the most unusual of the four stories, telling of the affection between the eponymous concierge and a dustman in a generally comedic manner. Finally, in ‘The Building Site’ the relationship, between an older man and a young girl, is resonant of Duras’ most famous work, The Lover, though in this story the couple have very little contact.

In ‘Whole Days in the Trees’ we immediately sense the distance between Jacques and his mother. Her wealth is displayed in the seventeen gold bracelets she wears on her arms and in her appetite – the food Jacques and Marcelle have to offer is not enough and she soon insists on buying more:

“They had this in common, all three: that they were blessed with a hearty appetite. The son and Marcelle because they lived in state of continual semi-starvation. The mother because, as a young woman, she had had appetites for power and strength that had gone unsatisfied…”

The mother wishes Jacques to take on the management of the factory, regarding his present life as wasteful – “there is gold there, do you hear!” she tells him, “Gold to be earned.” Her faith is fuelled by a belief that (as she tells Marcelle) “if he’d chosen to work he would have moved mountains.” Jacques, however, has always chosen the easiest path:

“I can’t work, I don’t want to work. I don’t want to work.”

Even in his relationship with Marcelle he is open in admitting that he does not love her and will soon move on. As she tells his mother, “the moment he has one woman, he goes after another. It never ends.” His mother believes these attitudes originate in childhood (“That’s how it began”) as he never wanted to go to school. The story’s title, ‘whole days in the trees’, is a reference to how he spent his schooldays:

“…once you’d awakened me, instead of going to school I would go around routing out birds’ nests.”

The story captures the way in which both mother and son are trapped in roles they both loathe but are unable to change through their repetitive conversations and the tension of their competing desires, with Marcelle as a meek chorus.

In ‘The Boa’ youth and age also coexist with differing needs. The narrator is a schoolgirl whose family owes a debt to Mlle Barbet for having accepted her into the school. For this reason, she cannot object to regularly accompanying her teacher to the zoo, where, among the other animals, they watch a boa eat a chicken (the boa is a fairly obvious phallic symbol). This visit is followed by Mlle Barbet showing the girl her “lovely linen”:

“She stood very straight so that I could admire her, looking at herself lovingly, half naked.”

Mlle Barbet is in her sixties and, as the narrator expresses it, in a state of “very advanced virginity.” She goes no further than exposing herself, and the girl learns a lesson typical of Duras – that desire should not be repressed. Desire is also the subject of ‘The Building Site’ where a man watches a young girl walk into the woods. Time passes and, when she does not return, he follows her and finds her looking at a building site – the focus of her having ‘discovered’ it suggests that what is also being ‘built’ is her awareness of her own desire. They have a brief conversation, but he does not follow this up, merely watches her from a distance over the days that follow until:

“…she had at least understood the slow power of his waiting and the imminent dawning it contained.”

The story ends with them meeting in the woods for the second time.

‘Madame Dodin’ features a much more comical love story between the title character, a concierge, and the local dustman, Gaston. She has various ways of tormenting those who live in her building – insisting they bring out their rubbish daily, stealing their parcels, and retrieving objects fallen out of windows claiming never to have seen them. Only Gaston is treated kindly but, as the years pass, their friendship fails to go further. Although gentler, it also feels like a warning against repressed desire.

Whole Days in the Trees demonstrate a remarkable range in Duras’ writing, and, in particular, a sympathy for older women of all classes. It reasserts her abilities as a writer who has been rather marginalised as telling only one story. Though in some ways her fame persists, it would be better if her work was also more easily available.

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Lost Books – Emily L

June 1, 2019

How good a writer was Marguerite Duras? Certainly good enough to have most of her work translated into English, but, twenty-three years after her death, very little of that remains in print, with only The Lover apparently impervious to fashion. Of course, she wrote so much and for so long, mainly novellas, slight and intense, and, I suspect, repetitive. There is perhaps a clue to her process, and therefore her legacy, at the end of Emily L, a late novel from 1987 which was quickly translated by Barbara Bray:

“…one ought to write without making corrections, not necessarily at full tilt, no, but at one’s own pace and in accordance with what one is experiencing at the time; one ought to eject what one writes, manhandle it almost, yes, treat it roughly, not try to trim profusion but let it be part of the whole, and not tone down anything either, whether its speed or its slowness, just leave everything as it is when it appears.”

That the novel ends at this point reminds us that it is as much about writing as anything else. Its narrator, we assume, is Duras herself, sitting with her lover (addressed as ‘you’ throughout) in a bar overlooking the Seine. “One day,” he tells her, “it’ll all be in a book – the square, the heat, the river,” and she acknowledges:

“I was going to write the story of the affair we’d had together, the one that was still there and taking forever to die.”

Instead they watch another couple in the bar, an English couple (much of their dialogue is in English in the original) who have arrived by boat. He is quickly designated the Captain, and she, later, Emily L. The narrator observes that their relationship, too, is coming to an end:

“It was clear it was all over, and at the same time she was still there.”

This idea becoming conflated with another ending, death:

“And they’re at the end of the last voyage, the end of life.”

Emily, in particular, is seen as a living momento mori:

“Her body, hidden before, is now visible. Visible in its mortality. Her body is dressed like a girl’s, in the worn-out clothes of youth; on her fingers the diamonds and gold of her people in Devon. But under the dresses and the skin, death is naked…”

Already the narrator is reading her story into what she sees and, as the novel progresses, she will create Emily’s narrative from her observation, which will also be her own story, having decided “to write it all directly – no, that’s all over, I couldn’t do it now.” Emily, too, we are told, was once a writer, writing poetry – an act which the Captain finds unbearable:

“The Captain suffered. Suffered tortures. As if she’d betrayed him, as if she’d led another life at the same time as the one he thought she’d been living in the apartment over the boathouse. A life that was secret, hidden, incomprehensible, perhaps even shameful, and more painful to him than if she’d been unfaithful to him with her body.”

It is the first poem she begins writing after she has lost a child which the Captain destroys; when she cannot find her unfinished work she does not write again. It is at this point that they begin to travel: “All other uses for their love were rejected.”

This ends the first part of Emily’s story, but the narrator begins it again, introducing the character of the caretaker of Emily’s family home for whom Emily has an unfulfilled longing, something the narrator’s lover immediately connects to her:

“…you wanted to have one absolute perfect love, and at the same time to have another, to help out.”

The divergence in their lives is that the narrator has continued to write, an activity which allows her some control:

“…when it takes possession of your whole life long… It’s as if it protected you from some kind of fear.”

In contrast she wonders whether Emily “every evening of every day…with the languishing gentleness, the incredible tact of the English, she’d asked to be allowed to die.” The narrator’s own fear is referenced in the novel’s opening line – “It began with the fear” – and strangely represented by a group of Koreans.

In the retelling it seems very much as if one character (the narrator) is telling the story of another character (Emily), but the novel is far more subtle than this, with the stories bleeding into each other, not only in their parallels but in their telling, and, of course, Emily existing in the world of the narrator. This makes for an enigmatic narrative (sometimes too enigmatic: “They were so alone in the world, they’d forgotten what solitude was”) which focuses on seeing (“We must have looked at them first without seeing them, and then all of a sudden have seen them”) with the suspicion that in looking too closely we see only ourselves, or, closer still, “under the dresses and the skin, death is naked…” A novel of so many surfaces we can no longer tell the depth.

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Moderato Cantabile

August 27, 2016

moderato

Marguerite Duras’ short novel Moderato Cantabile (translated in 1960 by Richard Seaver) is neither ‘moderate’ nor ‘melodious’; just as her son refuses the instructions of his music teacher to play in such a style, so too does Anne Desbaresdes attempt to rebel against the strictures of her own quiet life. The music teacher, striking “the keyboard a third time, so hard that the pencil broke right next to the child’s hands,” has no effect. The stand-off is interrupted by a scream, “a long, drawn-out scream, so shrill it overwhelmed the sound of the sea. “ The boy begins to play, but as he does so it becomes increasingly clear that something serious has occurred below – a woman has been shot. Anne leaves in time to witness the aftermath:

“At the far end of the café, in the semi-darkness of the back room, a woman was lying motionless on the floor. A man was crouched over her, clutching her shoulders and saying quietly:
‘Darling. My darling.’”

Anne becomes fascinated by the crime, returning to the café the next day where she strikes up a conversation with another customer, Chauvin, on the subject, pretending that she was unaware of the murder:

“Perhaps they had problems, what they call emotional problems.”

Chauvin, it transpires, already knows who she is:

“You have a beautiful house at the end of the Boulevard de la Mer. A big walled garden.”

WITmonth

Anne’s visits to the cafe become daily, each time meeting Chauvin and discussing the murder. Duras hints that their relationship echoes that which so recently ended in death:

“They met by chance in cafe, perhaps even here, they both used to come here. And they began to talk to each other about this and that.”

The man, having mentioned Anne’s house the first time they spoke, proceeds to describe it in more detail, as if he is drawing closer to her:

“Isn’t there a long hallway on the second floor, a very long hallway onto which your room and everyone else’s opens, so that you’re together and separated at the same time?”

The conversation continues at cross-purposes, her insistent probing of the reasons for the woman’s death – a death, it is suggested, she chose; he describing her own life to her. He returns time and again to the workers of the company her husband manages walking beneath her window, sometimes heard, sometimes observed, as predictable as the tide:

“Whether you were asleep or awake, dressed or naked, they passed outside the pale of your existence.”

Their appearance at the cafe, at the end of the day, acts as a sign for her to leave. The man, it seems was once such a worker, remembering a visit to her home, “you were standing…on the steps, ready to receive us, the workers from the foundries.” We are given the impression he has loved her since that moment; what is less certain is how she feels about him, perhaps seeing him as an escape from a life she finds intolerable. What is without question is that their intense feelings charge every scene, with Duras able to encapsulate enormous passion in a moment such as when he lays his hand next to hers. Slowly their discussion of the murder becomes a discussion of their own relationship:

“He had never dreamt, before meeting her, that he would one day want anything so badly.”

Very little happens in Moderato Cantabile: like the sea, which is so often referenced, it is what lies beneath the surface which is most powerful and dangerous. Duras beautifully conveys the repressed feelings of her protagonists to create a love story unlike any other.

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