Thérèse Raquin
1867
Thérèse Raquin is Zola's clinical vivisection of desire. Raised alongside her sickly cousin Camille in her aunt's grim mercery, Thérèse is a wild creature slowly suffocating under the weight of obligation. When she meets Laurent, her husband's friend, the hunger she's spent years suppressing erupts into something desperate and absolute. The lovers commit murder to be together, but Zola is far more interested in what happens after the blade than before it. The married couple Thérèse and Laurent become prisoners in their own home, haunted not by ghosts but by the unbearable knowledge of what they've done. Zola described his method as "the anatomical analysis performed on living bodies that the surgeon performs on corpses" , and nowhere is this colder, more unsettling precision more apparent than in these pages, where passion curdles into something toxic and the victors destroy themselves as thoroughly as their victim. The result is a novel that reads like a psychological horror story written by a scientist: precise, unflinching, and utterly devastating.
Editions
X-Ray
“When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.””
— Emile Zola
“They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.””
— Emile Zola
“In the sudden change that had come over her heart she no longer recognized herself””
— Emile Zola
“Nothing could be more heart rending than this mute and motionless dispair””
— Emile Zola
“He knew that, from now on, every day would be alike, that they would all bring the same sufferings. And he saw the weeks, the months, the years that awaited him, gloomy and implacable, coming one after the other, falling on him and suffocating him bit by bit. When the future is without hope, the present takes on a vile, bitter taste.””
— Emile Zola
“Sometimes she was seized with hallucinations and thought she was buried in some vault together with a lot of puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their legs and arms when you pulled the strings.””
— Emile Zola
“they seemed to be greater strangers than before””
— Emile Zola
“They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were.””
— Emile Zola
“Living in musty shadows and dismal, oppressive silence, Thérèse could see her whole life stretching out before her totally void, bringing night after night the same cold bed and morning after morning the same empty day.””
— Emile Zola
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Zola, Emile. Thérèse Raquin. Lex, lex-books.com/book/th-r-se-raquin-1762def0-99b9-4e05-a992-8ee9d8701f97.Zola, E. (1867). Thérèse Raquin. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/th-r-se-raquin-1762def0-99b9-4e05-a992-8ee9d8701f97Zola, Emile. Thérèse Raquin. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/th-r-se-raquin-1762def0-99b9-4e05-a992-8ee9d8701f97.
