Four Novels By Marguerite Duras - The Square - Moderato Cantabile - 10:30 on a Saturday Night - The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

by Marguerite Duras

Four novels by one of the most important literary figures in France.

Genres: Fiction, France, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Classics, Literature, Female Authors

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novellas really, all 4 only 250 pages. All of these stories are written in low key, understated prose, almost as if seen through a bit of fog. I’m reminded of Duras’ novel Emily L, which all takes place in bar where so much is unheard, misheard, partly misinterpreted, perhaps misunderstood and filled in with what is assumed or presumed.



In The Square, a young man and young woman converse in a park. She’s a governess, there with her charge; he’s a traveling salesman. We and they assume she’s timid and homebound and that he’s worldly and daring but little by little we come to realize the opposite.

In Moderatro Cantabile, a woman sits waiting while her spoiled, obstinate son takes piano lessons. One day they hear a commotion in a nearby bar and discover that a murder has been committed -- apparently a man killed his lover. This event opens up a new vista to the woman and she starts going to the bar frequently trying to learn what happened. She comes dangerously close to leaving behind her dull, loveless life.

In 10:30 on a Sunday Night, a woman, her husband and child, and a family friend spend a night at a hotel. We have hints that their marriage has developed strains. During the night the woman encounters a man who is on the run from the police for killing his lover. She helps him escape. (Moral for women: don’t go on a vacation with your husband and bring your drop-dead beautiful girlfriend.)

In The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas an elderly man waits in a village for his daughter to return home and for a man to arrive to give him an estimate on remodeling his patio. The contractor’s wife arrives before her husband does and they realize that both their lives will change as the two late arrivals are dancing together in the village.

Good stories worth a read.
(Poster pictured is from omerohome.com)

[Sawsan · Rating 4 out of 5]

four short novels by the french writer Marguerite Duras written between 1955 and 1962
Duras connects strangers at her novels, men and women at various conditions and places
their conversations revealing their thoughts about life, emotions, lonelyness and experiences
through the dialogue we explore the interiors and changes of the characters
interesting lovely stories, with a dialogue like a musical work converting from tensed to smooth, and vice versa

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

As indicated by the title, this book consists of four novels by Marguerite Duras, a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker.

The Square

This novella consists solely of dialogue between a young woman and man—strangers to each other until their paths happen to cross in a public park. Their encounter evolves into two parallel chain-of-consciousness ruminations about the futility of their lives. At one point it is explicitly stated, “We really are the lowest of the low.” He is an itinerant vender of nicknacks carried in a suitcase, she babysits a young boy for an obese woman. This story can be taken as a study into finding the will to carry on with a life that seems to be worthless.

Moderato Cantabile

This story concerns the life of a married wealthy woman and her varying relationships with her child, a piano teacher, and an unemployed man who whiles away his time in a café. Her life evolves into a scandal, she drinks too much, and in the end vomits food from a dinner party. It’s a tale of forbidden desire leading to ruin.

Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night

This long short story (a.k.a. novella) begins with a dark and stormy night and two love triangles. One of the triangles consists of two murdered victims and one fugitive. The other triangle (actually four) which is the focus of the book's narrative consists of a French couple, Pierre and Maria, on vacation in Spain with their four-year-old daughter Judith, and a young woman named Clare.

This story compels me to ask the following four questions:
1. What sort of couple with one child decides to go on vacation with a fourth “friend” who happens to be a young attractive woman?
2. What would motivate a woman on her own initiative decide to help a murder fugitive escape the law?
3. Why would her husband go along with her plans once he was informed?
4. Does the results of one love triangle forebode the direction of the second triangle?

Whatever the answer to the above questions may be, our vacationing family ends up in night club in Madrid watching an entertainer with a “chalky laugh” singing with “loving, languorous, nauseous drunkenness.” Those descriptive words were surely carefully selected by the author as a fitting conclusion to this story. (Actually, the words chosen by the author were French words; what I read is an English translation.)

The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

This novel consists of the internals thoughts of a wealthy man who sits on his front porch and looks down on the local village next to the bay below. As the afternoon progresses we learn that he is waiting for a contractor to come and discuss some improvements to his house. We also learn that the recent purchase of the house and the anticipated improvements are prompted by a desire to please his teenage daughter. (No mention of a wife.) The child and the wife of the contractor make appearances during the afternoon, but the story ends just prior to the anticipated appearance of the contractor and the man's daughter. I guess this story is about the patience of waiting and anticipation.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taken all together these early-mid Duras novels express her ability to render a kind of charged stillness, where much of the action and the prime tensions and relevances remain off camera or even entirely unexpressed. Individual reviews under the various book pages. The middle too are immaculate, the other two are more or less supporting material, at least relatively speaking.

The Square (an introductory dialogue)
Moderato Cantabile (unresolved tensions)
10:30 on a Summer Night (climax/explosion)
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (fadeout)

Actually, I'll give my brief blurb on Andesmas here, since I don;t think it appears in English translation besides in this volume. After the somewhat startlingly eventful couple days encompassed by 10:30, Andesmas is all calm and subtlety. Almost to the point that nothing happens at all. I mean, literally speaking, nothing happens. Except, as with most Duras, there seems to be a lot churning beneath the surface that never gets full expression. A contemplation of endings, fadeouts -- even if they're going to slowly end or fade for a long time yet, there's still a point at which the ending begins, and this is it. The extreme minimalism is impressive, but also somewhat less engaging than the other novellas here -- I think it probably benefits from inclusion in context with the others, whereas if I'd just picked up a copy of this alone, I might feel a bit of a letdown. As it is, though, an effective wind-down.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, these aren't really novels, but novellas. None are as long as 100 pages. I approached it the same as I do short stories, alternating each with another read. Even so, I struggled with parts of each story.

The Square: A young woman who was a servant, was watching a child in the park. A man who was a traveling salesman sat on the bench to talk to her. The story is almost entirely dialogue. This in itself would not be a problem, except that the person speaking wasn't identified. I got mixed up sometimes and had to backtrack until I figured it out again.

Moderato Cantabile: The scene opens with the child taking piano lessons. He has talent, but is stubborn. His mother just shrugs her shoulders. But on one Friday, a scream is heard in the cafe/bar across the street and after the lesson she goes to learn what happened. The child goes out to play while she has a drink. Naturally a man talks to her. Some days she goes to the bar and meets the man without having been at the music lesson. I honestly didn't understand why the woman was unhappy at home. That said, this was the easiest story to follow.

10:30 on a Summer Night: A woman, her husband, friend, and young daughter were traveling in Spain. This is another case of a woman drinking. I didn't need to know why this time, she was an alcoholic. The reader is too close and I was definitely uncomfortable. This story had more plot and better characterizations than any of the others.

Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas: I'm glad the collection didn't start with this one, else I might have abandoned it. Mr. Andesmas has bought a house for his daughter and is waiting for a contractor to show up to get an estimate for a terrace. A dog walks by. The contractor's daughter comes to tell Mr. Andesmas her father will be late. There is lots of waiting around. And for me, the reader, there was lots of waiting around for something to happen, or for more characterization, for something/anything. Eventually there is more to be revealed and rather than being glad of it, I was simply relieved that I was getting to the end.

I have liked other books by Duras. Based on those, I'll likely read others, but not based on this one. I'd like to find a third star for this, but I just can't. Maybe I wasn't the right audience for it.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE SQUARE- This novel follows a conversation between a man and a woman on a bench in a park. They talk about their lonely ways, and each seems to taunt the other, daring the other to break their patterns and habits. It could be seen as a symbol for the nature of romance. You want to be with one another to escape the loneliness, and yet a part of you still clutches on to that singular identity. It is a short meditative reflection on the psychological underpinnings of everything we say to one another. Worth the read!

[Jed Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and wonderful stories with the most amazing off-kilter dialogue.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began reading this collection of four novellas some months ago. Yesterday I finished the last one, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas. I have become a fan and am now reading a biography of Marguerite Duras.

[Mina-Louise]

I find myself so easily transported by Duras.

[Teddy Shpak · Rating 4 out of 5]

full of quiet longing (and dialogue!);

if you should come across Duras, i recommend 10:30 on a Summer Night (which reminded me of The Sun Also Rises)

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I've now read all four of the short novels in this collection, I did it so slowly I've put my other three reviews under the first three novels' stand-alone editions. These reflections, therefore are only for the last one, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas.

This is another one very close to the techniques of theater writing, two conversations that unfold over the course of a single afternoon, revealing, bit-by-bit, an evocation of place, the characters involved, and a dramatic situation, which is wholly played out off screen (so to speak). I don't want to go into it any deeper than that for it could only sap a little of the joy of the reading-as-exploration that makes such texts work so well. Suffice it to say this last of the four novels in this fine collection is very engrossing in its slow reveal and, in the end, quite moving.

Duras writes so well about creeping anxiety, people in limbo between certainties, and the near hysteria that such situations provoke--which is, I guess, her trademark as an author of both fiction, theater, and film. This particular narrative taps into what I think is a universal truth about which, for dramatic reasons, not many authors touch on. As I put it in one of my own short stories, some of the most important events of our lives happen between other people when we're simply not around. The terror and frustration of not being involved in some of the most momentous moments of our own lives is indeed fodder for hysteria, feelings of impotence and alienation, and Mr. Andesmas is a terrific evocation of such a situation.

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I labeled this 'to read' rather than 'read' because it has been so long. But the writing has stayed with me as especially sensual and immediate -- like being more than like writing. That was new to me, that sense of dispensation with the distant, story-telling narrator.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although we probably shouldn't place 'women writers' in a separate category but just treat them as writers, I feel I ought to say that Marguerite Duras is my favourite female writer. Muriel Spark comes close, but Duras has the edge, because although both have a very original way of looking at the world and both have superb prose styles, Duras has an extra quality that I can only refer to as 'luminosity'. Her work glimmers, shines, feels drenched in ancient sunlight, and the stories themselves seem to be the shadows cast in this light, the shadows of lives, hopeful, distressed, abstract, yielding, hungry, somnolent, feverish. The first book of hers I encountered, The Sailor from Gibraltar, is one of her early novels, a sequence of works that Raymond Queneau later condemned as too 'sentimental', criticism that she listened to and responded to by changing her style, paring it down, sharpening it, making it a devastating tool of psychological and situational examination.

Yet I adore that novel and found its message of liberation to be hugely uplifting, despite the dark elements that come later in the working out of the plot, the price of freedom. But I understand why her later style is so praised. It is haunting, beautiful, bittersweet, odd and tangential. The characters in her stories rarely or never say anything directly. They circle around the point in a descending or ascending spiral until the meaning becomes more clear. These exchanges feel like a series of non sequiturs but are not. They are quite unlike exchanges in the real world and yet feel very accurate, very representative of the way people do communicate.

The first of the four novels in this volume is my favourite among the quartet. I appreciate that it's not technically or thematically the best. It's the simplest, a work that is on the cusp of moving from her older, more conventional (but still hugely impressive) style to the new way of doing things that she is in the process of inventing. The Square is a conversation between two individuals who are utterly unlike but who share a precarious situation in life. Both have been crushed and are still being crushed by their situations, yet there is hope for them, they create a way out through force of will, and perhaps the future will be better for them both. This is a story of suffering with a positive ending.

The second and third novels, Moderate Cantabile and Ten Thirty on a Summer Night are technically the most perfect in this collection, and this is because they are the most plot driven. The latter is especially complex. Both are about crime, about how a desire for liberation can end up embracing perversion. In the former, the woman protagonist is a victim who wishes to escape her present agony of spirit by changing her oppressor to someone new, rather than freeing herself from all pain. In the latter, the woman protagonist is more in charge, more capable and daring, more active, although she is limited by the circumstances created by others.

The fourth novel, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas is the polar opposite of The Square. A successful man is now very old and heading towards death. He is already immobile and has to wait for encounters to come to him. He is rich and complacent and yet the world no longer really cares about him. There is no hope for him now, his life belongs almost entirely to the past, and he sits in the chair that is his prison outside the house he has bought on the hillside and watches the world as it continues to move him into the past and slowly replaces him with the new, with new people having love affairs, with the young and their own problems, which he can do nothing about, because even his acquired wisdom has become powerless.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best known as the screenwriter of "Hiroshima Mon Amour", these novellas by Marguerite Duras all have a feeling about them of being a screenplay rather like that one. Characters talk endlessly in a slightly detached way, and pages go by of alternating lines without even a "he said" or "She said" appended so it is easy to lose track of who is actually speaking. All four stories capture a small number of characters, 2-4, in a limited time frame (anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks) in which something destabilizing and somewhat transformative happens, usually involving love and death.

[Megan Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting, lovely, restrained, full of unresolved tensions. Duras is a master when it comes to writing emotional truths, and letting the reader make the discovery on his own. Each of these stories, in a different way, leaves one feeling uncomfortable and unappeased. Each of them I've been thinking about since I read them.

[Vishy · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Annie Ernaux’ Simple Passion, I read somewhere that that book was similar to Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. So, I thought I should read The Lover sometime. Recently while thinking of new French novels to buy, I discovered that there was an omnibus edition which had four of Marguerite Duras’ novels in it – The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night and The Afternoon of Mr.Andesmas. Four novels in one book – how can one resist it? One of my friends had also recommended Moderato Cantabile and 10:30 on a Summer Night and Moderato Cantabile was also one of the featured books in Lance Donaldson-Evans’ One Hundred Great French Books. So, I had to get this collection. I got it last week and finished reading it yesterday. Here is what I think.

All the four novels featured in the collection – The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night and The Afternoon of Mr.Andesmas – had one common narrative technique. Two strangers, typically a man and a woman, met accidentally in a place – a park, a café, a bar, a meadow – and started a conversation. The rest of the book was the conversation. Sometimes the conversation happened over a few hours. Sometimes it got interrupted and continued the next day and went on like this for a few days. So, most of these books were filled with conversations and dialogue. This is the kind of narrative technique which is irresistible for a reader like me. So, I totally loved the format of these novels.

Now on the individual novels.

The Square features a travelling salesman and a housemaid who meet accidentally in a park. They sit at the opposite ends of a bench and strike up a conversation. They talk about their lives and experiences which touched them deeply. The maid wants to change her life, but she feels that she can do it only if she gets married. The salesman is indifferent to his life and has accepted it. He enjoys travelling and the experience of discovering new cities though he doesn’t think much about his job. How this accidental meeting touches these two people and brings subtle but important changes to their perspectives on life forms the rest of the story.

Moderato Cantabile is about Anne who takes her son every week to a piano class. One day, at the café opposite the piano teacher’s house, a man shoots and kills a woman. After the class Anne strikes up a conversation with a bystander and discovers that the man and the woman were lovers and the woman was already married. It is not clearly known why he shot the woman. Some people say that she asked him to shoot her and he did it out of love. The next day Anne takes her son for a walk to that place, enters the café and has a glass of wine. A stranger sits next to her and Anne strikes up a conversation with him. They talk about the dead woman and her lover who killed her and who has now been arrested. This stranger buys Anne more wine. After a while Anne leaves, but she comes back the next day. The stranger waits for her. They have wine together and continue their conversation. They continue talking about the two lovers, one of whom is dead. The stranger says that they probably met in a café like this and started having a conversation accidentally which later turned into love. After a while we the readers start getting the feeling that Anne’s life starts resembling that of the dead woman more and more – she meets a stranger in a café and has a conversation, she starts going to the café regularly and the stranger waits for her and buys her wine and the continue with a conversation, and they start feeling a connection. Anne is also married to a wealthy man and she has a son. What happens next? Will this all end well? Will Anne’s life really mirror that of the dead woman? The answers to these questions form the rest of the story.

10:30 on a Summer Night starts with a scene which is very similar to the main theme of Moderato Cantabile. There is a woman who is sitting in a café and she has a glass of wine while having a conversation with a stranger. The stranger tells her about a murder that has happened in the town recently. A young woman has been shot and killed by her husband Rodrigo. When I reached this point of the story, I couldn’t wait to find out whether this was another version of the story told in Moderato Cantabile, but told from a different perspective. But, at this point the story changes direction. This woman, Maria, goes to the hotel where her husband Pierre, her daughter and her friend Claire are waiting in the lobby. Maria senses that Pierre and Claire are in love, but they try to hide it from her. She is unsure of the future. That night because of the storm which is passing over the city there is no power and everything is dark. There is a murderer afoot as Rodrigo hasn’t been caught by the police yet. There are policemen everywhere waiting to nab Rodrigo. Maria is not able to sleep at night, while everyone else is sleeping soundly. She suddenly sees a humanlike form on the opposite roof. She realizes that it could be Rodrigo. She calls him gently. After a while he responds by getting up and waving his hand. Maria asks Rodrigo to wait, goes out, gets her car, goes to that building entrance and asks Rodrigo to climb down from the roof and come down. He comes down and hides in her car. Maria beats the police patrol and drives out of the city into the countryside. She parks near the fields and Rodrigo gets out. They have a short conversation. Maria tells him that she has to go back to the hotel. She says that she will come back by around noon and get him and then they can leave the city. Rodrigo nods and then goes to sleep in the fields. Maria goes back to the hotel. Is Maria able to come back and get Rodrigo? Is Rodrigo able to escape from the police? Does anything happen between Maria and Rodrigo? What happens between Maria and Pierre? Do Pierre and Claire get together? The answers to these questions form the rest of the story.

The events of The Afternoon of Mr.Andesmas happen across an afternoon. Andesmas is sitting in his chair outside his home which is there on a hill, dozing away the afternoon. He has an appointment with Michel Arc who is expected to come and discuss with him about building a terrace for his house (his daughter Valerie wants the terrace) but Michel hasn’t arrived. After a while a dog passes through the place, tries to be friendly, wags its tail and then leaves. Then Michel’s daughter comes and tells him that Michel will be late. Andesmas waits for hours but Michel still doesn’t arrive. Then Michel’s wife arrives with the same message – that Michel will be late. She then comes and sits next to Andesmas and they have a conversation. The story continues in this vein till the end. Michel doesn’t arrive till the end.

I liked the first three stories in the book very much. The Afternoon of Mr.Andesmas didn’t have the same kind of impact on me. It was probably because it made me think of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot where two people wait for Godot and nothing happens on the stage and Godot doesn’t arrive till the end. My favourite out of the first three was probably the first story The Square and this is probably because I read it first. If I had read one of the other two first, they might have been my favourite. But I liked the way all three stories explored the characters’ interior worlds through conversation and dialogue and when we think that there is nothing happening in the stories – there are no events, only conversations – we realize when we reach the end of the stories that a lot has happened in the characters’ interior worlds and the characters have undergone subtle and sometimes strong changes which have transformed them in very important ways. The way Marguerite Duras brings out the intensity of emotion and feeling of her characters not by describing them but through conversations and how through this conversational window she gives us a peek into the core of her characters’ hearts is a defining feature of all the stories. I loved this aspect of the stories.

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book. (all from The Square)

“All the things you describe and the changes you notice are there for anyone to see, aren’t they? They are not things which exist for you alone, for you and for no one else?”
“Sometimes there are things which I alone can see, but only negligible things. In general you are right : the things I notice are mostly changes in the weather, in buildings, things which anyone would notice. And yet sometimes, just by watching them carefully, such things can affect one just as much as events which are completely personal. In fact it feels as though they were personal, as if somehow one had put the cherries there oneself.”

“As for the other kind of fear – the fear of thinking that no one would notice if you died – it seems to me that sometimes this can make one happier. I think that if you knew that when you died no one would suffer, not even a dog, it makes it easier to bear the thought of dying.”

“Please don’t think I want to contradict you, but you must see that whatever you do, this time you are living now will count for you one day. You will look back on this desert as you describe it and discover that it was not empty at all, but full of people. You will not escape it. You think this time has not begun, and it has begun. You think you are doing nothing and in reality you are doing something. You think you are moving towards a solution and when you look round you find it’s behind you.”

Have you read any of these four novels or any other books by Marguerite Duras? What do you think about them?

[annika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably closer to a 3.5 or 3.75.

“THE SQUARE”
An older traveling salesman and a young woman who keeps houses talk repeatedly in a town square. The story is mostly dialogue and explores each character’s perspective on life and happiness.

Not necessarily the most engaging since the conversations felt a bit repetitive at times. It’s easy to get lost in the dialogue, which is both inconvenient and also an interesting technique which bridges connections between the two characters despite how different they are.

“MODERATO CANTABILE”
Anne Desbardes takes her son to a piano lesson with Madamemoiselle Giraud only to hear a loud scream of a murdered woman. Anne grows increasingly obsessed with the the murder and the reason it took place. She begins binge drinking wine at a cafe with a seemingly unemployed man named Chauvin. There’s something between the two of them despite not knowing each other and despite Anne’s marriage. Bonding over the crime, leads to Anne’s eventual scandalization.

Duras is really interested in family, infidelity, crime, desire, passion. It’s interesting to read the different ways she interweaves this themes throughout all the stories. I thought this one was really interesting. I love that Duras likes writing about drunk women.

“10:30 ON A SUMMER NIGHT”
Maria is an alcoholic on vacation in Spain with her husband, Pierre, and her friend, Claire. Pierre is having an affair with Claire. Maria knows this. While heading to Madrid, a storm leaves Maria, Pierre, Claire, and Judith (Maria and Pierre’s daughter), taking shelter in a small Spanish town that is abuzz with the news of a murderer on the loose. Rodrigo Paestra has killed his young wife and the man she caught with. Maria drinks heavily, discovers her husband’s infidelity, and becomes obsessed with finding Rodrigo.

Again, kind of similar to “Moderato Cantabile” in terms of themes, but Duras is great with them! This and “Moderato Cantabile” were my favorites, with this one maybe being first.

“THE AFTERNOON OF MR. ANDESMAS”
Mr. Andesmas has brought property for his daughter Valérie in a small town by the sea. He seems very wealthy and fought Valérie’s mother for custody for their daughter but still seems unaccustomed to fatherhood in many ways. He waits for Michel Arc, the contractor, to meet him and look at the property, but Arc takes his sweet time. Arc’s daughter and wife visit in the meantime, and his wife hints at an illicit affair between Valérie and Arc.

This was a bit of a slog. Especially since I felt I’d been chipping away at this book for a while and this was the last story. He sits by himself for a while, and though the prose is very pretty at certain moments, it was difficult to not fall asleep reading this after my lunch break.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

sometimes the “novels”, more like novellas, border on self-parody, but when they’re good, they’re great (first two parts of Moderato Cantabile are excellent). still think i prefer Duras’ work in film. India Song is a perfect movie, but i have not found her perfect book yet.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This entire collection was engrossing, but "Moderato Cantabile" and "10:30 on a Summer Night" are great short novels. They put me in mind of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Anne Porter's work, with a sort of psychological intensity wrapped up in elegant sentences and a sense of doom. I'm glad I picked up a copy of this Grove Press gem on a whim, and I'll certainly read more of Duras' work.

[lucy black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read ten thirty on a summer night last night with all the windows open and summer smells drifting in. It is beautiful.

[Laura Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most formative collection I've ever read.

[Bradd Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are differences in meaning between words like unhappiness, depression, despair, and resignation. And yet they all share something in common: a sense of hopelessness and even defeat. It’s quite possible the Duras did not really feel any of these stories in this book could be characterized in this fashion. In fact, she may well have seen them as being optimistic, given what comes through as her overall worldview. But the sensation of reading them, in total, is one of an almost overwhelming melancholy.

In all four of these beautifully written novellas there is the sad sensation of futility, the idea that there are forces in the world that work always toward a condition of impermanency and yet, ironically, can also result in a stultifying sameness to things. In particular, it is love that is seen as fragile, as offering a hope in the beginning it cannot fulfill. While the desire to love someone can remain the feeling itself does not. Like everything it is subject to the forces of dreadful wonder, decay and dissolution, to neglect and the need for novelty. And yet, even when love dies it does not mean that everything is over: people are still bound by the grip of habit, fear, a sense of responsibility, and convention, leaving everyone ultimately in what can only be understood as a liminal state, a place of never really arriving or departing.

The Square is the only story of the four that does not involve the destructive effects of infidelity. In this novella, another theme emerges which is compatible, but different. It is the issue of immobility, the difficulty of knowing how to act or when, which is related finally to the ongoing problem of never really knowing who you are and what you want. The burden of decision rests on the self but who can ever really say what that is? How does the self happen? Who’s in charge of it? And yet decisions must be made and are made in ways that feel somehow outside the self, in a manner that is both mysterious and banal.

The prose in all the books is simple. Dialogue is oblique and the action is elliptical but the environment is dynamic. It’s constantly changing, people come and go, winds rise and fall, the tides roll up and recede, rain beats down on the world and then stops, only to start again, the sun is as constant as it is capricious.

And yet there is a suspense in everything that doesn’t happen, a sense that everything is hovering over an abyss, a feeling, in its way, that brings a strange comfort as well as terror.

Duras is a novelist, at least in America, who is often overlooked but there are few people who wrote in the way she did, so simple yet philosophically complex, so inventive, and courageous. Her works exists in a paradox. She has such a great faith in her voice even as she writes about faithlessness. It’s enchanting and full of subtle contradiction.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book that has fallen in the bathtub in 2018...it's me, not the book...I've just been mentally dragged around between home and work life so the peaceful moment of reading a good book has been disrupted by rude awakenings as I'm fishing a soggy paperback out of the bath, and once knocking over my wine glass on the tub edge in the surprising process...fuck. I'm tired. Anyway...this is my first trip with Marguerite Duras and I'm loving her...there's magic here to be enjoyed. Quiet journeys, pensive, these novellas are lovely little gems of human documents...love and passion, solitude and dread, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to come, searching for answers to questions, brief human bonds, the complexities of relationships, father, daughter; husband and wife; strangers; lovers; mother and son. The flow of alcohol and moments of time; storms and shadows; night and day, the breaking of dawn and the setting sun; the flow of dialog and inner thoughts. Each story goes with the flow of life, such as it is, and each only a fragment of reality, ending just as they begin, as if you're passing through, picking up the pieces of conversations, turning the dial on the radio to another station...

[Brian Grover · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the title, I'm not sure any of these four stories qualifies as a novella, much less a novel - I think the longest clocks in around 70 pages. Three of these stories are dead ass boring and an absolute grind to read. It's the kind of book that leaches the joy out of reading.

I will say that the fourth story, 10:30 on a Summer Night, I enjoyed. A boozehound woman and her husband are driving across Spain towards Madrid along with another young woman when they're forced to stop at a small town by a heavy thunderstorm. The woman immediately goes to the local bar to have several drinks, and hears there was a double murder just a few hours ago and the killer is on the loose. She goes back to the hotel and tells the others, but they're sneaking off to start an affair and don't care, so she keeps drinking and wandering around the hotel - and then she spots the killer hiding on the roof of the building across the street and decides to help him flee from the cops. It reminded me of a cross between Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and the Twilight Zone episode where only the one plane passenger can see the gremlin on the wing.

I give that story four stars and the other three stories here one star, averaging out to a two star rating.

[Jason Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating this is made difficult by the fact that the translations were done by a number of people. The least accurate translation is of The Square, and the errors, basic errors, begin in the first sentence, with 'devant' in the original becoming 'behind' in the translation. The final sentence traduces Duras's work by adding the idea that the girl not looking back is taken as a sign of encouragement by the man, whereas the original simply ends with the woman not looking back. This translation also has lots of typos while the others don't, so it'd be great if this novel was republished.

Moderato Cantabile is a much better translation (it's also a much simpler text). I read it in parallel and it was accurate and read well in English. Wonderful novel, just beautifully composed.

The last two novels have the same translator, but are less substantial in the original, so make of them what you will.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is marvelous how Duras conjures up a poetic intensity from very simple situations. The paraphrasable plot is laughably simple, but the patterning of language and incident is masterly. There are intensifiers deployed—a limited time and place, the intoxication of alcohol, the murder of one's lover, music, a storm—but all woven in so naturally that they seem to come from within the characters, rather than without. The man and the girl would find their way to the park bench one afternoon because they are who they are. The method is to bypass psychology to aim straight for the formal, and intense, emotion.

[Mark Broesamle · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Square - 4/5
Moderato Cantabile - 1/5
10:30 on a Summer Night - 1/5
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas - 3/5

Marguerite Duras has very little storytelling sense, but is a wonderful symbolist and dialectician. The Square, being the one novella of the four that most fully leans into her strengths, is the only unmitigated success of the collection. I sort of suspect (and will be following up these suspicions on Criterion and Letterboxd in the coming months), that Duras’ artistic sensibility translates better to film, the faces of Delphine Seyrig and Jeanne Moreau articulating ennuish blankness in a far more satisfying fashion than ink and paper ever could. Yuuuuuppp!

[Eva Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

the last story was just so depressing, it drained me. there is something draining about the long, drawn out way Duras writes, with dialogues so vague and misleading that finally end in more mystery. this book is dark, seductive at times, with dim lighting and drinking in Moderato Cantabile, and then sadly, tiredly seductive in 10:30 on a Summer Night. I couldn't stop imagining Duras' face in both of those stories, as the sad and drinking woman, wanting and wanting. I am glad to be finished, and glad to have read this.

[Madelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“She comes closer, sits down right next to the old man and this time they look at each other but only while she is speaking, exactly. “Then,” she said, “she finally reappeared. The curtain was moved aside. We saw her as she crossed the whole square in the opposite direction. Slowly. Taking her time. Taking the time of those who were looking at her, as if it had been owed her from time immemorial, without realizing it.” “Without realizing it,” Mr. Andesmas repeated. Once again they were banished into that moment when she had seen, completely, fully, forever, the beauty of Valérie Andesmas”

[WombleWho · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Square - 3
Moderato Cantabile - 5
10:30 on a Summer Night - 3
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas - 3