Status Updates From Four Novels By Marguerite D...

Finished 10:30 on a Summer Night.

Finished Moderato Cantabile.

Finished The Square.

10:30 on a Summer Night takes on a startling quality of both genre storytelling (it is perhaps the novel most dense with action out of those I’ve read from Duras so far, even with its moments of overripe, rotten stasis) and its sketching of art cinema plotting, feeling perfectly in line with the kind of infidelity, anticlimax, and weak genre elements one expects in films of this kind. Lovely stuff.

Loved Moderato Cantabile… Such a sensuous experience, Duras using perceptual events (the sound of a piano lesson, the waft of perfume from magnolia trees) to motivate shifts in alignment by tracing these stimuli as they travel across an interconnected space that destabilizes public/private distinctions.

Finished The Square last night. I was somewhat cautious of the form Duras’ novels would take, having more familiarity with her challenging film works and their sound-image disjunction. I was pleasantly surprised to find The Square painfully psychological, depicting Bergmanian depths of character as coming in fits and starts in between pleasantries. Hit me like a bolt of lightning; beautiful stuff.