(Re)lecture de Moderato cantabile. L’esthétique de l’inachèvement, la stratégie de dissimulation et l’envoûtement de la fiction

Moderato cantabile, published in 1958, still engages the reader, constantly urged to follow an inferential reading path due to an (incomplete) elliptical narrative structure. The author maintains an epistemic imbalance between the storytellers, devoid of any authentication authority, and the reader, often challenged to fill the voids of the text. Various narrative instances, which seem to escape their conventional narrative contract, alternate in the narration of sketched stories, linked by a common thread of strange analogies. The result is a fictional universe always initiated and always elusive, damaged by the contradictory statements of those who tell the narrative, weakened by the process of dissimulation (of diversion and of disguise) wherein the creative imagination of the reader can penetrate. This way, the text sets up a representation of the theory of the novel and, at the same time, a defiance of the traditional realist novel.