Therese Raquin

This was my first experience of reading Zola, but it certainly won't be my last. This novel was an absolute page-turner. Written in 1867, Zola's character experiment with personality types—melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric—and his bleak descriptions of dirty, dark, smelly, nineteenth-century Paris totally fascinated me. The story gripped me throughout, even though it started out bleak and was never destined to end well. I found it a fascinating study of what happens to unhappy people who overstep the bounds in their search for personal gratification. A time-worn tale made fresh and horrible. As a bonus, I bought this when I visited Shakespeare and Company in Paris last week, so the cobble stones and little alleyways show more were fresh in my mind as I was reading. show less

Thérèse Raquin had a rough reception when it was first published. Vile, putrid, immoral, pornographic, a cesspit, were just some of the descriptors from the critics. What caused such an uproar? Zola explained his motivation

I chose to portray individuals existing under the sovereign dominion of their nerves and their blood, devoid of free will and drawn into every act of their lives by the inescapable promptings of their flesh. {…} I set out to trace, step by step, the hidden workings of the passions, the urges of instinct, and the derangements of the brain which follow on from a nervous crisis. {…} There is a total absence of soul, as I will readily admit, for such was my intention.

Thérèse is the first of these individuals. show more Quiet and docile on the surface, she was brought up by her aunt together with her sickly cousin, Camille. Forced to look after Camille when they were children, and even sleep in the same bed with him, she was completely repulsed. The trio moved to Paris when Camille was old enough to find a job. Madame Raquin opened a haberdashery store in the dismal Passage du Pont-Neuf, a place without light or air. She and Thérèse ran it, sharing one bedroom, and Camille went off to work daily, returning to an evening in the dining room between his bedroom and that of the two women.

Thérèse and Camille married, sinking the new bride further into despondency as she moved to her new room across the hall. Life seemed devoid of any future until one day Camille brought home an old acquaintance from their village. Laurent, “tall, strong, and fresh faced”, astonished her in contrast to Camille, with his “weak and puny body”.

Here we have three temperaments colliding: the nervous disposition of Thérèse, the sanguine Laurent, and the lymphatic Camille. Such theories were already outmoded at the time Zola wrote the book, but Andrew Rothwell in his detailed introduction, says Zola felt he could make literary descriptions of these character types.

Thérèse needed only to encounter a full blooded man of the earth like Laurent for all her suppressed energy to erupt. Inevitably she and Laurent had an affair, right under the noses of the unsuspecting Madame Raquin and Camille. A chance remark by a visiting guest one evening convinced them that they should be able to do away with Camille in a murder disguised as an accident, so that they would never be caught. They could live freely with their passion for the rest of their lives.

These actions from the basis of the book. Zola explores their lack of guilt, the animal nature of their deed, committed just like an animal which kills another for food. Their only fear was that of being caught. Camille, however, would not rest. His spirit haunted them in all their doings, initially appearing only in the evenings, and then without cease. How to dispel this ghost became their sole concern, each in their own way.

Temperaments shift back and forth. As the personalities change, there are cataclsymic shifts in their relationship. Everything is made worse by the claustrophobic living conditions surrounding them. How this all plays out is the heart of the novel.

What are readers to make of such amoral characters, with whom they are unlikely to engage? Whatever they decide, it may ultimately be the sort of hell bent for leather race to the bitter end, to discover the dénouement that keeps them going.

This was Zola’s third novel, written before he started on his Rougon Macquart cycle. While it bears the marks of an early novel, the seed for his exploration of nature and nurture is clearly there, making it well worth reading to those who read him in depth. show less

I picked this up because Kate Winslet is a fantastic narrator. I have listened to several books she has done, and they were full of fabulous, so as soon as I saw this one, I snapped it up. And I am trying to read more classics and more translations. Speaking of translations, I have no idea who did this one - I have looked and looked but cannot discover who the translator was for this edition, so if any of you know please speak up. I wish Audible would do a better job of crediting the translators - I feel like I always have to go looking for it in other sources. Anyway, it's awful. The story is awful and the people in it are awful, and yet I could not look away. It's about lust and greed and murder and paranoia, and the best character is show more not the title character but instead Madame Raquin, who is the aunt and MIL of Thérèse. The story loses a full star for me because of what happens to the cat near the end of the story - it is horrible and completely gratuitous. What Zola did do well was to create psychological tension that slowly builds into madness, and even though you know how it has to end you have to watch it play out. It's like an Alfred Hitchcock movie without the comic relief or the character that you root for. show less

Therese Raquin lives with her mother-in-law and cousin, who is also her husband, in a haberdashery shop in a dingy Paris arcade. Every day, she sits quietly with her mother-in-law while her husband leaves to go to work. Apparently meek and accepting of her small life, she is, in fact, seething with anger and passion.

Once a week, a group of friends and colleagues descend on the apartment to have dinner and play cards. There, Therese meets Laurent – an imperfect, but available lover.

The two conspire to murder her husband, without realizing that the act will drive them both into madness.

Despite this only being an English translation Zola's writing is still sublime and compelling, full of black macabre poetry, so much so that I could show more hardly put this book down. The intricate development of each of the characters, from Laurent and Thérèse to Camille and Madame Raquin, as well as the vivid portrayal of 19th century middle class Paris, was exquisite. Zola, takes his readers down into the murky depths of the human soul in this exploration of adultery, murder, betrayal and revenge.

When this novel was first published in 1868 it was considered scandalous, much to Zola's annoyance, which helped it gain immediate notoriety and success but now some 150+ years later it has become one the most widely read 19th century French literature and rightly deserves it's place on that list. show less

If you think serious depravity is a theme confined to 20th century literature or later, you need to read Therese Raquin. This book paints a brutal and unrelenting story of two amoral people who will even fake the appearance of guilt and remorse. At first I was put off by the repetition. In the beginning it was the grungy arcade, shop and claustrophobic rooms where Therese and family spend most of their lives. Then it was the description of that life and what led to present circumstances. Each section of forward progress is really over-the-top and repetitive, but once Zola is done and moves beyond, it’s pretty much left in the past. Which is good because the sheer emotional turmoil is enough to cope with from one time frame to the show more next.

It’s that emotional turmoil that had me at the breaking point for believability. No, I’ve never been a murderer or an adulteress, so I don’t know what that kind of guilt can do to a person, but it seemed like drama for drama’s sake. Either in the narrative style, or in the intent and motivations of the characters. Whichever it was, it felt alien, like it did in Crime and Punishment. All the murderers in these tales have many a justification for their crimes ahead of time. Their victims deserve to be killed. The killers have the right to do away with their victims because justice is on their side. But after the killing is done, all fall prey to their own twisted psyches which feed on escalating guilt if not exactly remorse.

For Therese and Laurent, they wait so long to engineer their eventual marriage, that any passion they manufactured for each other (out of propinquity and ennui) is gone; burned out by the act of violence they committed and has gone unpunished and undetected. Camille’s death was and will forever be an accident to the world and what is more natural than to bring Camille’s widow and best friend together in a union to honor the drowned man. By the time they connive their way into their legitimate relationship, all they have left is fear, guilt, self-pity, and hatred for each other. Zola describes it well in one short sentence - “Waiting had extinguished the flame that had formerly fired them.”

Some say that Therese is portrayed as a more base creature than Laurent and is the victim of the writer’s misogyny and chauvinism, but I didn’t feel it was unbalanced. Laurent is described as not caring if he hurt Camille or his mother. He’s brutish, lazy and delusional about his right to live a completely idle life on the money Therese will inherit from Madame Raquin. His “love” for Therese is brought on by the fact that he cannot have her, not from anything genuine. I found the use of the word sweehearts to describe what they are to each other to be the height of irony and I don’t know whether to attribute it to Zola or the translation. Either way it is the perfect antithesis of their true nature.

As bad as Laurent is, Therese is a perfect match for him. She manipulates Laurent to violence and uses this to engineer some sort of pardon in her own mind. She abases herself before Madame Raquin and though the old woman is beyond speech, determines that she does in fact forgive Therese for killing her son. With these ideas twisting in her brain, she attempts to live a life outside of her household and tries on loose living and drink for a while. So does Laurent. It doesn’t work to relieve them of their hallucinations of the dead man and they are inexorably drawn back together in a spiral of increasing violence and hate.

The gothic heights of perverted morality and atmosphere are pretty thick toward the end and the Poe vibe is even stronger. Their impending madness is always in the forefront of the narrative and it doesn’t take much to see where this will end up. With Madame Raquin’s paralysis a la Noirtier being the absolute capper on the whole situation, the tension escalates to the inevitable conclusion which, really, is the only way it could end and it satisfies. Therese and Laurent deserved each other and were true to their natures to the bitter end. show less

Thérèse Raquin swims in a vast ocean of guilt and sorrow. Initially trapped in a loveless and boring marriage arranged and planned for Madame Raquin’s interest, Thérèse an orphan, without a taste of independence as a mind of her own, not so much their consideration for her own opinion, rebel in the most repugnant of ways. What starts off as small doses of freedom and pleasure becomes a gnawing hunger for an unrepentant and reckless solution. And as this slips easily in that small, tight interstice between murder and ardour its most appalling and perverse plot device is not with the offense committed but the inflicted psychological torture that heightens page after page. It traps in a cellar of nausea. Complicity becomes ugly show more resistance.

Zola’s acerbic and riveting prose where the plot is seamlessly ingrained is certain to shock and horrify to this day. However, as some twists and turns can be infeasible and absurd they mildly take away the pounding suspense and excruciating punishment of a passionate love turned hatred. It also includes some of the medical, often in psychology, beliefs at that time which are both interesting and ridiculous (hysteria as the only malady of women, anyone?) A novel easily not for the faint-hearted; short and scalding. show less

While reading ‘Thérèse Raquin’, I asked myself, “Wow, Zola. Who hurt you??” The answer is of course Society. Compared to his other novels that I’ve read, ‘Thérèse Raquin’ has a much narrower focus on the deeply toxic relationship between the main characters. He concentrates upon a microcosm of life, a single small cramped household rather than class conflict or a historical event. The results is a novel with perhaps the most gothic and doom-laden atmosphere of anything I’ve ever read. The ending, and indeed much of the content, could (should?) be merely melodramatic. Such is Zola’s insight and conviction, however, that instead it’s an unsettling reminder of the darkness that can lurk behind a bourgeois facade.

I show more found it especially powerful that the Thursday evening social gatherings continued as the Raquin household descended into violence and madness. Visitors proclaimed the married couple happy, even as they flailed around a hell of their own devising. It was an ingenious choice to place the murder early on and ensure that no mystery or key clue remained. The culprit(s) get away with it as far as the law is concerned, so the narrative can then dwell at length upon their psychological unravelling. The two main characters are chillingly amoral, and at the time their irreligiousness must also have been shocking. The message seems to be that even those who proclaim no apparent remorse for evil acts are haunted by them, such that the effects manifest physically. (This theme is also memorably explored in [b:The Kindly Ones|3755250|The Kindly Ones|Jonathan Littell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347999215l/3755250._SX50_.jpg|2916549].) The very helpful introduction, as ever to be read afterwards, makes a comparison that also occurred to me, with Greek tragedy. There is a sense of nemesis, as an impersonal universal force that prevents a murderer enjoying the results of their crime. Justice clearly isn’t done in any kind of legal sense, yet the brutal act rebounds heavily upon those who sought to benefit from it.

I found it interesting that Thérèse is central to the narrative, as she is in a sense reactive yet also a catalyst for everything that happens. She has initiative and strong self-interest, as well as a talent for manipulation. Laurent is more active, but also less stable: a friend considers him wholly changed and marvels at his newly uncovered artistic abilities. As far as I could tell Thérèse remains essentially the same person throughout, a stifled and unhappy figure. Her sexual desires are linked by the narrative with her being mixed-race, which sure looks like 19th century racism, although she is also a complex and subtle figure. Zola takes what he apparently intended to be a wholly dispassionate attitude to the characters, rather than moralising. I can find some sympathy in my heart for Thérèse. Much more for the poor cat, though. He did no harm and deserved none of this.

One thing I think Zola captured exceptionally well was the combination of intense emotion and mercenary desire for money, a powerfully toxic cocktail of motivations. Laurent undertakes a sort of cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to have an affair with Thérèse. Later on, the deeply unhappy couple repeatedly play out the prisoner’s dilemma. It seems that reluctance to abandon their wealth and bourgeois facade keeps them living in extreme anguish and misery, right up until the end. The final scene, in which the paralysed old woman stares at the corpses of her son’s murderers, is certainly not one I will soon forget. Zola is exceptionally good at portraying fear and dread.

There is something strangely timeless about ‘Thérèse Raquin’, as the suffocation of a dysfunctional and violent household is hardly unique to mid-19th century Paris. The behaviour of the characters remains shocking and disturbing today. The morgue scene is especially hard to read. Nonetheless, I found the whole book absolutely compelling and a reminder that Zola is an incredible writer I should read more of. Adam Thorpe’s translation is also excellent: lucid, elegant, and not over-explained by endnotes. show less