How Marguerite Duras’ breakthrough novel changed a Hong Kong author’s life
Indonesian-Chinese novelist Xu Xi, who was raised in Hong Kong and went to university in the United States, admits a profound debt to the 1958 French novel Moderato Cantabile
With its minimal plot, spare dialogue, formal structure and vast unspoken well of bubbling sexual tension, French author and screenwriter Marguerite Duras’ breakthrough novel, Moderato Cantabile (1958), tells of a rich woman repeatedly discussing a recent murder with one of her husband’s former employees, and the pair not quite having an affair. Hong Kong novelist Xu Xi explains how it changed her life.
“I read the book when I was 18 or 19, in about 1972, during an intermediate French class at university. At that time, I could read some French. It was the most astonishing piece of literature I’d ever read. It reveals the way a woman thinks and it’s very sexual. The repression is overtly expressed.”
I’ve been an outlier most of my life, and it’s been a long, slow road, but Duras taught me that I didn’t need to compromise. She didn’t give a s**t about what she was supposed to be
“I was writing already and Moderato Cantabile struck me as the first thing I’d read that sounded realistic: so spare and so understated, with so much in between the dialogue. I thought it was a much better way to understand psychology than the study of psychology. This is humanity; this is the way people are.
“Marguerite Duras showed me that you can be a woman, find your own voice and write what you want, free from all the usual patriarchal expectations. This lesson has been invaluable. Fundamentally, women talk about relationships and sex in a much deeper way than men, and I’m fascinated by this.
“She broke a lot of rules about social mores. As a young woman, I was going through many of the same things as Duras. She was a real writer, an artist, a model for someone pursuing literary art.