Book #84: Thérèse Raquin

Book #84: Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola (translated by Edward Vizetelly)

April 17, 2014


Two translated books in a row? Yup. This was another book that I picked up, on a whim, while at the library with my nephew. I like to check something out when I get books for him. Sets a good example, I think. No one else in my family really reads, so who else will do it?

Anyway, I picked this book up from the "new fiction releases" shelf. This edition was published as In Secret, to go along with the film that apparently came out just a couple of months ago, starring Draco Malfoy and Mary Kate & Ashley's little sister, who both seem too young to play Camille and Thérèse, respectively. The cover to the film, used on the paperback cover, doesn't match the book all that well. Jessica Lange's Madame Raquin looks healthy, alert, and fairly young, not at all like Madame Raquin in the book. The lovers on the cover depict a passion that is never shown to the reader, though it is spoken of.

Okay, so I guess Zola had a message on morality and guilt in this book, but the characters are so stupid and lugubrious that I just don't give a shit. This book was boring, even as it tried to be shocking. Basically, Thérèse conspires with her liver Laurent to kill her husband (and cousin!) Camille. The two spend the rest of the book wallowing in their anguish before killing themselves. I wish they'd died sooner! I found myself thinking that Zola's message would have been more effective in a short story (and Poe told a story about guilt and psychology, much better than this book and quite shorter..."The Tell-Tale Heart," anyone?). As is, this book, though not very long, feels tedious and repetitive.

None of the characters are remotely likable. Zola make them all despicable. At first, I felt bad for Thérèse, stuck in a loveless marriage and a dull life. But she judged others as being "half-dead," like her aunt's friends who come over weekly to play dominoes, when she herself just sits and stares blankly all the time. What a dullard. At least Camille, spoiled man-child that he is, has some ambition.

Laurent is Camille's friend who begins a passionate affair with Thérèse. They conspire to kill Camille, with Laurent throwing Camille into the Seine, to drown...but not before a panicked Camille bites a chunk out of Laurent's neck, which leaves a haunting scar.

The descriptions of Laurent and Thérèse's sufferings are ridiculous. When the scene of their first night as a married couple is described, a imagined a Spoils of Babylon-esque scene with fuzzy lighting as the couple throw meaningful, terrified glances at one another for hours on end. And I realize that the idea of Camille's corpse sleeping in their bed is meant to be metaphorical, but Zola takes it too far. This might have been an okay book, but it's not very well written. Perhaps the French original is better; this is lauded by many as Zola's "best" novel, and I've never read anything else by him. I think this translation was poorly done as well. You don't have to literally translate "le cadavre de Camille" into "the corpse of Camille"..."Camille's corpse" will do just fine. And this was every possessive phrase. That got annoying as shit. Some sentences were translated in a way that hardly would have made sense, almost as if, in some places, it was translated word for word. There was bad editing, too. This wasn't a new translation; I downloaded the same one on my Kindle for free, public domain. It was just repackaged to support the movie.

Bottom line: next time, I'll go to the library with a plan. But I'll allow myself to deviate if I find anything that really catches my interest. This book was maybe a bit too French for me; the characters doing nothing to better their situations, just wallowing in their misery and living for nothing else, seemed so stereotypical. It definitely didn't give me any desire to see the movie.