Moderato Cantabile

Back Cover Text (From the Promotional Bulletin) 

From Marguerite Duras, one of the most powerful writers of modern French literature, a measured, minimal text, a small masterpiece, rhythmized in a musical style, with short scenes interrupted with each glass of wine being filled and emptied: Moderato Cantabile. A murder: A man kills his lover in a cafe. An encounter: A bourgeois woman meets a man who works next to her husband in the same cafe, and who has obviously been after her for a long time. The conversation that starts with the reason for the murder flows between what has been said and what has not been said about life, love and death, what has been experienced and what has not been experienced. Duras, who leaves it to the reader to understand what is revealed or what remains a mystery in the light of the darker dialogues, tells life itself in his extremely impressive style. The work, which won Marguerite Duras the Goncourt Prize in the year it was published and was adapted into a movie with the same name by Peter Brook, is an exuberant narrative in moderato cantabile rhythm, approaching the climax step by step.