Moderato Cantabile Summary
Marguerite Duras

Moderato Cantabile Summary

Anne Desbaresdes accompanies her child to piano instruction in a downtown apartment. The piano lesson is interrupted by a prolonged scream, which comes from a cafe near the apartment. After the piano lesson, Anne enters a large crowd gathered around the cafe and observes a dead woman, bleeding from the mouth, inside the cafe. The woman's husband crouches over the body in grief. The police arrest the man and take him away. Anne comes to understand that the man has murdered his wife, shooting her through the heart upon the wife's request.

Anne's life is regimented, repetitive, and constrained. She is a society wife, married to a prominent industrialist in the town. She spends her days is a dreary and inescapable cycle of meaningless repetition. She is compelled by the notion of an unbridled passion so strong that it could lead to such violence. Against all social convention, Anne returns... View more of the Moderato Cantabile Summary