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Thérèse Raquin: A New Translation
Paperback
Classic FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Dec 2 2024
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris: a covered arcade, glass-roofed, perpetually damp, its daylight reduced by the grime overhead to a greenish submarine light that falls on the haberdashery below and the apartment above with the evenhandedness of an environment that has never distinguished between the living and the half-alive. Thérèse Raquin has grown up here, married her sickly cousin Camille here, and learned to perform the stillness of a woman who has been given no vocabulary for whatever she actually is.
When Laurent comes - large, physically overwhelming, a man of appetites so uncomplicated by reflection that he constitutes, in Zola's precise physiological scheme, the exact chemical opposite of Camille's bloodless fragility - the reaction is not chosen. It is the compound forming.
Émile Zola published Thérèse Raquin in 1867, when he was twenty-six, and when the critics called it putrid he added a preface to the second edition that is one of the founding documents of French naturalism: a statement of method and intention that transforms the novel it introduces into a scientific proposition. His aim, he wrote, was not to study characters - not to trace the moral psychology of people making choices - but to study temperaments: human animals driven by their nerves and blood, as determined in their behavior as any other organism in any other reaction. What happens between Thérèse and Laurent, and what they do to Camille, and what Camille's face does to them afterward - these are not sins. They are consequences.
What follows the murder is the novel's real subject: the escalating mutual destruction of two people who find that the desire that drove them has been replaced, across the marriage bed they committed the crime to reach, by the dead man's face. Madame Raquin sits paralyzed in her chair and watches. The trap of the arcade has been reproduced inside the only relationship the killers have left.
It ends the only way the logic permits. They die together. She watches that too.
One of the most precisely constructed novels in French literature - and, more than a century and a half later, one of the most airless.
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