SOURCE: “The Anti-Novels,” in Marguerite Duras, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971, pp. 71-82, 88-95.

In the following essay, Cismaru discusses Duras's short stories and her novella Moderato cantabile as “anti-novels” in the tradition of the French New Novel.

“Le Boa” contains very little dialogue. It is a first-person brief memoir of a woman who looks back to the time when she was thirteen and she attended a school for girls whose directress, a virgin septuagenarian, had admitted her out of pity for her mother who was too poor to pay the full amount of the tuition.

Mademoiselle Barbet was at worst vicious, at best eccentric. While the other students were permitted to go out every Sunday, to the movies, for walks, to play tennis or otherwise amuse themselves, the narrator was subjected, each week, to two unvarying spectacles: a boa devouring a chicken at the local zoo, a free show...