Moderato Cantabile (1958)

[Simon]

   

A distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a café, watched by a large crowd.

Fascinated by the crime she has witnessed, Anne Desbaresdes returns several times to the scene, forming a relationship with a man who also saw the murder, and drinking through the afternoon with him as he patiently answers her eager questions. Slowly, they find themselves being taken over by forces which threaten their own stability.

Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion, in which the characters' inner lives are reflected by the story's spaces and landscapes. 

The story concerns the life of a woman, Anne Desbaresdes, and her varying relationships with her child, the piano teacher Mademoiselle Giraud and Chauvin. Chauvin is a working-class man who is currently unemployed and whiles away his time in a café near the apartment where Anne Desbaresdes' child takes piano lessons with Madame Giraud.

After the fatal shooting of a woman in the café by her lover, Anne and Chauvin imagine the relationship between the lovers and try to reason why it occurred. Anne frequently returns to the café, before returning to her comfortable home, the last house on the Boulevard de la Mer, which itself represents the social divide between the working- and middle-classes.

In the climactic 7th chapter, she returns home late and drunk to a dinner party, then causes a scandal (and is subsequently ill, vomiting) whose consequences are seen in the 8th and final chapter.