I didn’t even make it past the first page of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which I’d planned for June, so in the middle of the month I had to rifle through my shelves for a short and accessible classic and found just that in Thérèse Raquin (1868) by Émile Zola. I’d only read one Zola novel previously, Germinal (1885), about seven years ago. I remember finding Germinal, an exposé of the working conditions of miners, heavy-handed, and while the same could be said of Thérèse Raquin, the latter is so deliciously Gothic that I could forgive the hammering on extreme emotions and points of morality that takes up the second half.

“The Passage du Pont-Neuf is no place to go for a nice stroll. You use it as a short cut and time-saver.” Yet this is the Paris street on which Madame Raquin runs her haberdashery shop, having moved here from a Normandy town when her son Camille insisted on getting a job with the Orléans railway. He has recently married his first cousin, Thérèse, whom Mme Raquin raised as her own daughter and always intended for Camille. Mme Raquin’s brother, a naval captain, had dropped off this product of his short-lived relationship with “a native woman of great beauty” from Algeria. Thérèse used to bear sisterly feelings for the sickly Camille, but finds him repulsive as a bedfellow, and their new Paris lodgings feel like a “newly-dug grave” – she can “see her whole life stretching before her totally void.”

It’s no particular surprise, then, when Thérèse is drawn to Laurent, a colleague and old school-friend of Camille’s who joins in their regular Thursday night soirées. Laurent and Thérèse start an affair right under the noses of Camille and Mme Raquin, with Thérèse throwing “herself into adultery with a kind of furious honesty, flouting danger, and as it were, taking pride in doing so.” There are details here that make today’s reader cringe: Thérèse’s “African blood” is cited as the reason for her reckless passion, and her first encounter with Laurent doesn’t sound fully consensual (“The act was silent and brutal”). But you also have to cheer for Thérèse, at least a little, because she’s finally chosen something for herself instead of just going along with what everyone else wants for her.

Before long Laurent and Thérèse are dreaming of how much better their lives would be if only Camille were out of the way and they could be together forever. They start plotting. This is a definite case of “be careful what you wish for.” I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers, except that the rest of this brief, claustrophobic book is a consideration of the ramifications of their decision, and it’s a gloriously lurid vision of what guilt can drive people to. From the “delicious terrors and agonizing thrills of adultery,” the couple is thrown deeper into a “sink of filth.” While you might predict the book’s general outcome, its exact ending surprised me.

Zola’s novel is certainly in conversation with Madame Bovary, though it’s nastier and more obsessed with the supernatural than Flaubert’s 1857 novel. Upon the publication of Thérèse Raquin, Zola was accused of pornography, and in a preface to the second edition he felt he had to defend his commitment to Naturalism, which arose from the Realism of Flaubert et al. Looking forward, I wondered to what extent Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Talented Mr. Ripley might have been influenced by Thérèse Raquin. Particularly if you’ve enjoyed any of the works mentioned in this paragraph, I highly recommend it.

 My rating:

 

I read a Penguin Classics edition of Leonard Tancock’s 1962 translation.

 

Next month’s plan: I have George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London on my stack to read soon. After Sophie Ratcliffe’s The Lost Properties of Love, I might be inspired to read the first in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, The Warden. Or maybe after a week spent in Italy I’ll be led to pick up D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between would also seem like an appropriate classic to pick up in the summer months.