A short story by the French writer Marguerite Duras

It tells something mysterious about the life of a wealthy lady

And gradually reveals the feelings of unity and sadness

Duras' style of storytelling is different... simple and gentle, but also engaging

Marguerite Duras is a renowned French writer known for her unique literary style. Her short stories often explore complex themes and emotions in a deceptively simple manner. In this particular story, she takes us into the world of a wealthy lady, hinting at the hidden aspects of her life. Through the course of the narrative, the reader is slowly drawn into the lady's emotional landscape, experiencing her sense of unity and the underlying current of sadness. Duras' writing is characterized by its simplicity and gentle tone, which belies the depth and complexity of the themes she explores. Her ability to engage the reader with her understated yet powerful prose is what makes her work so captivating.

"Madratu Kantabileh" is the best novel and the best new work that I have read.

In my opinion, the most prominent features of the new novel and of course Duras' works are as follows:

Attacking the styles of classic novels and realism.

Eliminating the incident.

Eliminating the traditional character portrayal.

Eliminating the plot and structure.

Changing the form and style of narration.

Changing the style of dialogue writing.

Questioning.

The human becoming a thing.

The great value of things.

The value of place.

Repetition.

Boredom, boredom, boredom.

Something occurred to me and I add it.

..

Some other features of the new novel:

Lack of clarity.

Memory (very mediocre style of Proust).

Eliminating the hero.

Activity and diversity (close to Beckett).

Image (influence of cinema).

Disorder in the face of classic order.

The use of various times (modernists, Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and Woolf).

August 16, 1990.

The content is extremely boring. It made me want to cry every time I had to read it. I earnestly request the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters to send books that are a little more interesting and whose objective (right from the title itself) is not to be a slow and repetitive story.

It is really disheartening to encounter such dull materials. Reading them feels like a chore rather than an enjoyable experience. I believe that students deserve to have access to books that can激发 their interest and engage their minds.

The Faculty of Philosophy and Letters should take into consideration the preferences and needs of the students. By providing more interesting books, they can enhance the learning process and make it more enjoyable for everyone.

I hope that my request will be heard and that the faculty will take appropriate action to improve the quality of the books they send.

A slim and seductive novel awaits the reader, presenting a unique take on a classic theme. It can be considered a sort of nouveau roman version of Brief Encounter. The story begins when Anne Desbaresdes meets Chauvin after a shooting is heard during her son's piano lesson. There, she sits with the haughty Mademoiselle Giraud, persistently urging her stubborn son to play a Diabelli sontana moderato cantabile (moderately and singingly).

As the narrative unfolds, we gradually discover that Anne is a drunk and is deeply, desperately in love with Chauvin. However, their feelings remain unspoken. It is only through the poetic and slippery prose that the subtext becomes clear. The ending, too, is quietly heartbreaking, leaving the reader with a sense of longing and melancholy.

Interestingly, the wiki page on this book, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderato_Cantabile, is oddly detailed, providing additional insights into the novel and its creation.

I have read both the French version and its Persian translation up to the end of chapter three. But then I realized that there is nothing in the French text that I would lose by not reading it. Therefore, I decided to only read the Persian version from now on.

I really like chapter one - which describes the exercise of the young man and the crime in the café on that side of the street - and chapter seven - which describes the masterpiece of the 15-person bourgeois dinner table. Between these two chapters, there were few places where I felt boredom due to excessive repetition or, in some cases, confusion. Another element that really stuck with me was the vivid presence of the factory, the port, the workers, and the boats. These sudden descriptions of the sound of the factory whistle, the crowd of workers pouring into the café, the very loud radio sound, the last rays of the sun coloring the café wall red, the excitement of the boy when seeing a pleasure boat in the port, and so on, had a very strong realistic impact. They completely create a fascinating and realistic space - as if I also enter the café among the crowd of workers in that port and quickly drink all my drink; sometimes I also look at it under a window and see that the back of the hall is sitting caught in the alternation between anxiety and peace...

I wanted to write more about it, especially about how I analyzed this relationship for myself at the beginning and a little later. But after reading the appendices of the book, I realized that there are enough hints there to make my words redundant.

It was very similar to the film "Hiroshima, Mon Amour". However, the qualities of the two products were different. It is no news here about that poetic shock that seeing that film measures to a person's life.

This similarity might initially lead one to assume that they are almost identical. But upon closer inspection, the nuances and details that set them apart become evident. The first one might have a certain charm and style that is unique to it, while the second one might offer a different perspective or a new take on a similar theme.

Each has its own value and significance, and it is up to the viewer or the consumer to decide which one they prefer. Whether it is the emotional impact, the artistic expression, or the overall experience, both have something to offer. In the end, it is all about personal taste and perception.

A slug and a turtle meet in a bar to have conversations about snails.

The slug slowly makes its way to the bar stool, leaving a slimy trail behind. The turtle, on the other hand, moves at a more leisurely pace.

As they sit down, the slug starts by saying, "I've been thinking about those snails. They seem so slow, but they always manage to get where they're going." The turtle nods in agreement and adds, "Yes, and they have those hard shells to protect them."

The slug then wonders aloud, "Do you think we could ever be as fast as a snail?" The turtle chuckles and replies, "Well, maybe if we really tried hard."

They continue their conversation, sharing stories and opinions about the snails and other creatures in the animal kingdom.

By the end of the night, the slug and the turtle have a newfound appreciation for the humble snail.

Modera-to (medium tempo) Cantabile (flowing like a song) was almost too slow and boring for us. There were times when we accidentally thought that the thing itself might gradually fade away, with the guidance of teacher Sain helping us in life. But by the seventh chapter, we found that we were wrong. The music changed the tempo to Allegretto, Andante, and then broke down before reaching Vivace because the tempo was just too vivid.

"So we will end our story here," said Xiao Wang. He added, "Sometimes things just have to be like this, huh."

It ended like a song that was passionate with the heart of the songwriter and was driven by the forbidden love of his, who was actually the lover of the co-star.

The story line of this work is extremely thin, yet it is described in a gloomy manner, much like in a nouvelle vague film.

The main characters appear to be machines that observe the life around them and within them with awe, constantly grappling with their feelings and the constraints of conventions.

This immediately reminds one of Sartre, Camus, and on the level of style, of Robbe-Grillet.

Initially, this minimalism holds great appeal as it is poetic in its simplicity. However, as the process unfolds, it starts to become a bit boring due to the lack of depth.

The work seems to stop at the surface, failing to explore the deeper layers of the human psyche and the complex web of emotions and experiences that lie beneath.

Despite its initial charm, the lack of substance ultimately detracts from the overall impact of the piece.

Perhaps with a bit more depth and exploration, it could have been a truly remarkable work.

A woman, Anna, accompanies her child to a piano lesson. He is reluctantly learning a sonatina by Diabelli, with the only indication on the score being: moderato cantabile.

In a nearby bar, another woman is killed by her lover. We know nothing about who they both are, and we will continue to know nothing about them. But the cry of the dying woman reaches the room where the child is reluctantly practicing the piano.

Anna, driven by an unmotivated impulse, in the following days goes to that bar with her child and, breaking every rule, begins to drink wine at the counter and talk to a stranger, obsessively seeking information about the victim and her assassin.

From this moment on, she will regularly return to the same bar, always in the company of her little son, who, upon arrival, leaves her to go play on the pier in front of the establishment, as if there were a silent agreement between her and the stranger to meet there.

We know very little about Anna, only that she is a well-known woman in the town, the wife of the director of the Costa Foundries, and that she lives in a large villa at the end of the Viale del Mare. We know even less about the man, only that his name is Chauvin and he is a former employee of her husband. We know nothing more about the husband than the fact that he exists.

Anna has never talked about herself, her behavior has always been irreproachable, and she has always been in control of herself, until the day of the tragedy that occurred at the bar. Now she is defenseless in the face of this new impulse that guides her, as if she were trying to adapt her new existence to that tragic one of the dead woman, of whom she wants to know every detail but about whom she only gathers fragmented information and rumors.

"She drank, she wanted her lover to kill her, her lover wanted to kill her, she had been kicked out by him but always came back at his slightest gesture; she was a bitch who mated with anyone." Anna too begins to drink and stay out later and later, as if it were becoming increasingly difficult for her to break away from that man who tells her his own existence as if he knew it even better than she did.

Together with him, she finds herself living a dream where it seems to her that she is seeing her own life through the eyes of another, every one of her actions distorted by the new consciousness that observes her; at the same time, it seems possible and inevitable to her that that same life retraces the steps of that of the dead woman.

One evening, things come to a head: at Anna's house, a reception is held to which she arrives very late and clearly drunk. At the table, among all the other ladies, proper wives for their men, she stands out disastrously: she behaves inappropriately, goes outside the norms of social behavior appropriate for the occasion, she is a stain on the immaculate score of her husband.

She will take refuge in the room of her beloved child, where she will vomit without restraint. She is surprised by her husband, "a shadow that appears in the doorway." Anna "this time will give an excuse. She will receive no answer."

After two days, she returns to the bar, for the first time without her child. The glances of the customers are unequivocal: it is now common knowledge, she is a dishonored woman, it is known around that she is an adulteress. Once again, she approaches Chauvin to talk: now she has before her the possibility of living the dream that he had told her, of being the woman that he had imagined living in the big house at the end of the Viale del Mare, a woman capable of freeing herself from the invisible chains whose weight seemed to have become unbearable.

But at the moment when she could take flight, Anna is overcome by fear, a fear so great that it almost makes her cry out. In herself, of all the courage and strength that she should find in this decisive moment, she cannot gather anything. She cannot break away from her own existence to imagine the realization of a different one, to imagine that she could become a different woman. So she gets up. So she leaves. So she returns to her own existence.

A very short but intense novel, to the point of spasming.

Margaret Duras is a long poem, with different verses in different books.

Under the name of Duras, "Susan Sontag" and under the name of Sontag, "Margaret Duras" interact. I imagine that every woman should read Duras, and of course every man too. Duras is another "Simone de Beauvoir", with the same boldness, courage and tenacity, but feminine and delicate. To read and understand Duras, one must have patience and attention, just as much as for reading Virginia Woolf. Many of Margaret Duras' works have been translated into Persian by Qasim Rouhani. "Summer 80", "The Sea Wall", "Pain", "The Deputy Consul", "Writing", "The Lover", "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis", "Summer Rain", "The Lover" and of course one of her masterpieces "Moderato Cantabile" has been translated by Reza Seid-Hosseini and "She Says; Destroy" has been translated into Persian by Mrs. Farideh Zindieh. As far as I remember, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" was also translated into Persian many years ago, probably by "Houshang Tavakoli". A book that I no longer remember any line of it, but the scenes of the film "Alain Resnais" with the play of "Emmanuelle Riva" remain alive in my memory, a film that was made in 1959 based on this short novel of Duras.

There is something magnetic in Marguerite Duras' writing, something that makes me insist on continuing to read even when I don't fully understand. It is fascinating how she constructs the relationships between her characters, and it is so because it is very different from everything else I have read.

Perhaps it has not much to do with it, but those desires to want to decipher her remind me of what happens to me with the cinema of Kiarostami, whom I came to much later. There is in these narratives a challenging work for the reader/viewer, and that is what catches me and leaves me with books and films that stay with me forever.

The way Duras weaves her stories, with their complex and often ambiguous characters, invites us to dig deeper, to try to understand the hidden emotions and motives. It's like a puzzle that we can't help but try to solve.

Similarly, Kiarostami's films have a certain allure that draws us in and makes us question what we are seeing. His use of long takes, natural lighting, and non-professional actors gives his work a sense of authenticity and immediacy that is truly captivating.

Both Duras and Kiarostami have a unique way of engaging their audiences, and their works continue to inspire and influence generations of readers and viewers.