Moderato Cantabile Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Times Literary Supplement

Critical Essay by Times Literary Supplement

SOURCE: “The Boy Next Door,” in The Times Literary Supplement, July 21, 1966, p. 640.

In the following review of Moderato Cantabile, the critic praises Duras's “controlled and hard-edged account” of her heroine's failures, but maintains that readers may feel unsatisfied with such a short book.

The music starts on page one [of Moderato cantabile], tinkling tangentially from a sixth-floor room. It is nothing gross like a symphony, or even a concerto, but a pretty sonatina for piano, by Diabelli. The score is marked moderato cantabile, but it requires the intervention of a woman's scream before we are really projected into the novel of the same name, available at last in English, in an American translation which blunts a good number of sharp edges.

The pianist is a small boy having his Friday lesson, prepared to show he is quite competent only when his mother obviously cherishes him. Because he...
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