What will the writer are read this summer? Several authors were asked the books they took in their suitcase for their holidays. Today, Phoebe Hadjimarkos-Clarke entrusts us with his comings and goings in the work of Duras.
“It’s been years that I have said to whoever wants to hear her that I hate Marguerite Duras. I had read some very young books without thinking about it much I think, then I was lost by LOL V. Stein’s rapture A big decade ago and I therefore decreed that this author influenced me. Except that this spring, I fell a little by chance on The loverI said to myself ‘why not’, and I was amazed, raised. I found a copy of Moderate cantabile that I had to read at 19 and who miraculously escaped the anti-Durassian purges and the moves, and that’s it, I am preparing to read with delight has The infamous and wonderful Duras!”
Published in 1958, Moderate cantabile is Duras’ eighth book and the first published by Minuit. He stages, in a small provincial town, a young woman who is bored, suddenly disturbed by a feminicide perpetrated very close to the apartment where every week she leads her little boy to a piano lesson. Many recurring themes of Duras are gathered in this short novel, where none of the mysteries surrounding the drama will be really resolved.
Moderate cantabilefrom Marguerite Duras (midnight Double 1980 collection), 172 p., € 7.90.
Phoebe Hadjimarkos-Clarke, last published book: Aliene (basement 2024), 288 p., € 19.50.
Interview by Sylvie Tanette
