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assimbya 's review for:
Thérèse Raquin
by Émile Zola
Thérése Raquin, a novel written by Émile Zola in 1866, is an intense and affecting book, at once freezing and burning the reader mercilessly. The story, which concerns a pair of adulterers planning to murder the husband who stands in their way, is a simple little thing, and perhaps handled with more complexity in Vladimir Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave. But it is not from its plot that the novel derives its power, though the last third shocked me by going to unexpected extremes in the lead-up to the conclusion.
It's a book of images, more than anything else, and those images are haunting, the sorts of things that linger behind the reader's eyelids like the emotional equivalent of a bruise. Which the narration style is curiously apathetic (deliberate on Zola's part - he talks extensively in the preface about characterization based on physiology) and the characters are impossible to sympathize entirely with, being either entirely morally corrupt or decent people but irritating beyond all measure (rather like many essentially decent people in the real world), the reader somehow is drawn, helpless, into the whirlpool of Thérése and Laurent's fates. The dark, depressing little shop in the Passage du Pont-Neuf took vivid, tactile shape for me, with its duty corners and perpetual cold, the starkness of the room where Thérése and Laurent's adultery was begun. It was a book to speed my breathing as I neared the end, to cause a deep exhale at the inevitability of the climax when I finally closed it.
It's a book with prose to savor upon your tongue, even in translation (my translation is by Andrew Rothwell, and I recommend it), though the beauty of the writing did not distract from the pain of the events it described, but rather added to them - the sort of book in which the author uses their powers of description not only to describe peaceful lakes and fragile beauty, but to paint pictures of bloated corpses and the passionless coupling of a married couple who are deathly afraid of one another.
I'm not sure to whom I should recommend it, for many people would be frightened off, the fearful images that I mentioned earlier painfully branded into their eyelids rather than bruised in the near-tears pain of exceptionally good books. Victor Hugo aficionados (being one, I can make this judgment) might be brought to nausea by Zola's lack of compassion for his characters. Those who enjoy the gleeful detestation of humanity espoused in the writings of the Marquis de Sade (myself not among this number) would be bored by the bleak realism and the simplicity of the storyline. The nearest book to which I can liken it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and from that, readers, you may make your judgments regarding whether you would enjoy this book. The differences, though, are significant, for Heart of Darkness' dreamlike mist would evaporate in the gaslights of Zola's Paris, and Heart of Darkness tells an epic, wide reaching story concerning the lives and deaths of many, while Thérése Raquin is small, localized, concerning only a few, whose lives and deaths (as the novel so skillfully shows) could so easily be forgotten amidst the complexity of a city with wider aspirations.
Read it then, read it by all means, but know what you have gotten yourself into. Know that this book is unsparing, uncompromising, entirely unkind. Know that it is not rose tinted, and that, in all the suffering by guilty and innocent alike, the only nobility, the only heroism, is paltry and useless in the face of the inevitable, destined tragedy which befalls all the characters, a tragedy which is not in the least Aristotlean.
It's a book of images, more than anything else, and those images are haunting, the sorts of things that linger behind the reader's eyelids like the emotional equivalent of a bruise. Which the narration style is curiously apathetic (deliberate on Zola's part - he talks extensively in the preface about characterization based on physiology) and the characters are impossible to sympathize entirely with, being either entirely morally corrupt or decent people but irritating beyond all measure (rather like many essentially decent people in the real world), the reader somehow is drawn, helpless, into the whirlpool of Thérése and Laurent's fates. The dark, depressing little shop in the Passage du Pont-Neuf took vivid, tactile shape for me, with its duty corners and perpetual cold, the starkness of the room where Thérése and Laurent's adultery was begun. It was a book to speed my breathing as I neared the end, to cause a deep exhale at the inevitability of the climax when I finally closed it.
It's a book with prose to savor upon your tongue, even in translation (my translation is by Andrew Rothwell, and I recommend it), though the beauty of the writing did not distract from the pain of the events it described, but rather added to them - the sort of book in which the author uses their powers of description not only to describe peaceful lakes and fragile beauty, but to paint pictures of bloated corpses and the passionless coupling of a married couple who are deathly afraid of one another.
I'm not sure to whom I should recommend it, for many people would be frightened off, the fearful images that I mentioned earlier painfully branded into their eyelids rather than bruised in the near-tears pain of exceptionally good books. Victor Hugo aficionados (being one, I can make this judgment) might be brought to nausea by Zola's lack of compassion for his characters. Those who enjoy the gleeful detestation of humanity espoused in the writings of the Marquis de Sade (myself not among this number) would be bored by the bleak realism and the simplicity of the storyline. The nearest book to which I can liken it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and from that, readers, you may make your judgments regarding whether you would enjoy this book. The differences, though, are significant, for Heart of Darkness' dreamlike mist would evaporate in the gaslights of Zola's Paris, and Heart of Darkness tells an epic, wide reaching story concerning the lives and deaths of many, while Thérése Raquin is small, localized, concerning only a few, whose lives and deaths (as the novel so skillfully shows) could so easily be forgotten amidst the complexity of a city with wider aspirations.
Read it then, read it by all means, but know what you have gotten yourself into. Know that this book is unsparing, uncompromising, entirely unkind. Know that it is not rose tinted, and that, in all the suffering by guilty and innocent alike, the only nobility, the only heroism, is paltry and useless in the face of the inevitable, destined tragedy which befalls all the characters, a tragedy which is not in the least Aristotlean.