Pate Duncan’s Reviews > Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas > Status Update

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.