Cultural Writing. Latino/Latina Studies. Fiction. Perhaps the most admired of all Marguerite Duras's novels, MODERATO CANTABILE is almost a twentieth-century MADAME BOVARY in its picture of the dissatisfied wife of a rich provincial industrialist, who forms an attachment to one of her husband's workmen. This is not the normal chronicle of adultery but a carefully woven tapestry of emotion. A haunting, oblique love story, it perfectly demonstrates the Duras technique of associating human emotion with locales and landscapes, and of describing longing, loneliness and love through references to weather, temperature, the color of the sky and the sound of the sea.

Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras (4 April 1914 - 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born at Gia-Dinh, near Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony. Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her three children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subseqent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period. At 17, Marguerite went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in law. This she soon abandoned to concentrate on political sciences, and then law. After completing her studies, she became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party). In the late 1930s she worked for the French government office representing the colony of Indochina. During the war, from 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance. Her husband Robert Anthelme was deported to Bergen-Belsen for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Marguerite, just 84 lbs). In 1943 she changed her surname for Duras, the name of a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films,