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Thérèse Desqueyroux French Edition François Mauriac 9782253004219 Books

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Thérèse Desqueyroux French Edition François Mauriac 9782253004219 Books

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Thérèse Desqueyroux French Edition François Mauriac 9782253004219 Books Reviews

Mauriac is a writer of grace and beauty.

He probes beneath the stuffy French family life of the past. But his dialogue is fresh and modern. Unsaid thoughts run

under the everyday speech. Greed and position seem to drive most of the family. Therese is a woman who dares to

live her own life and ignores the conventions around her. She is a modern heroine, struggling to free herself from

conventions. But the seine nets of respectability and position keep pulling her down. Few people take the time to know

Therese. Instead, they rely on gossip. Even fewer understand her.

Some readers may complain that there is not enough fast-moving plot in this story. It seems almost like a set piece,

something that Mauriac wrote as a homage to the past. Through his words, he tells us that the slow pace and thoughtful scenes

have value. This reader agrees with him. This is a book to read and re-read through different stages of your life. It will

mean something different to you with each reading. You will crest over the pages, happy that Mauriac wrote it.

------- Frank Hickey, writer of the Max Royster crime novels of Pigtown Books
In 1906, in Mauriac's home town of Bordeaux, a young woman named Blanche Canaby was put on trial for attempting to poison her husband, but found guilty only of a lesser charge. Two decades later, Mauriac used the case as inspiration for his most famous novel, THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX. Not only that, he would return to the character in four later novels. Why this fascination with an obscure criminal? Why this most unusual crime story, steeped in noir atmosphere (a night journey to the isolated pine forests on the SW French coast), but beginning where most crime novels leave off with the release of the accused from jail?

Mauriac was a devout Catholic, and there is evidence that he provisionally entitled this "Conscience, the Divine Instinct," making the entire book a confession to a priest. If so, he would have been pursuing the particular Catholic paradox whereby even the most terrible sinners can be brought in the end to God's grace, much as Graham Greene was to do in such books as BRIGHTON ROCK. But no; Thérèse remains essentially agnostic, and our one glimse of the local priest shows him virtually usless in his pastoral role. Yet traces of the original design remain. The author, who addresses his protagonist directly in the prologue and on and off throughout the book, talks of his hope that she will one day be brought to God. And Thérèse herself, in her long journey from the jail back into the care of her husband, rehearses the confession she will make to him, in much the same manner and with the same hope of absolution as if she were performing the sacrament in church.

The imagined confession admirably serves the novelist's need for exposition. Beginning as it does with the proclamation of "non-lieu," the withdrawal of the case because of the husband's refusal to pursue it, the reader has a lot of back-story to catch up, and indeed we are two-thirds of the way through the book before Thérèse returns home to Bernard Desqueyroux and the action can move forward. We hear of her growing up motherless in the great pine forest that she will one day inherit, her close friendship with her younger neighbor Anne de la Trave, and the virtual inevitability of her marriage to Anne's half-brother Bernard, owner of the adjacent property, a marriage largely to give her a settled status.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mauriac's treatment is his refusal to load the dice. Bernard is a man of little imagination, interested only in business and hunting, but no monster. He can be thoughtless in bed and certainly cold, but he is not brutal. Mauriac was conscious of the example of Flaubert before him, but Thérèse is no Emma Bovary. Although she is jealous when Anne de la Trave falls into passionate love with a young man who has recently come into the district, she does not seek other lovers. Indeed, as with several other Mauriac books, I picked up hints of homosexual attraction, and wondered whether she could be satisfied in marriage at all.

Although Thérèse is referred to once or twice as a monster, she is not portrayed as one either. But nor is she entirely sympathetic. She is a chain-smoker, self-centered, and an indifferent mother. But yes, she is trapped in a marriage that takes away her freedom without giving her anything in return, a situation that will become blindingly obvious when she returns to Bernard. There is almost a unique trajectory to this novel. Thérèse's mental confession does indeed have the effect of making her crime seem less heinous, but there is no absolution. Bernard's deposition at the beginning of the book may have released his wife from jail, but it was made for the sake of the family only, it is not forgiveness. This is Crime and... what? Punishment, but of what kind? Redemption? Hardly. Whatever Mauriac's original intention, his characters take their own course into a cold purgatory of their own making. No wonder he felt the need to return to Thérèse again and again.
Having recently watched the 2012 film version of François Mauriac classic novel, THERESE DESQUEYROUX, I felt the need to go back to the original novel, published in 1927, that I read decades ago when I was in my late teens. Reading Thérèse Desqueyroux's story with a twenty first century lens, I am fascinated by Mauriac's complex and multi-faceted presentation of her "case". Inspired by a "fait divers" concerning an actual court case that he read in his youth, Mauriac became deeply drawn to the young woman at the centre of it what motivated her to want to poison her husband; how did her charge for attempted murder led to a sentenced for a much lesser crime? How much was the environment in which she lived also responsible for pushing her to this extreme action? Was she born "an evil person" and finally what happened after the release?

All these questions and emerging issues are explored in more or less depth in Mauriac's 1927 novel. However, his approach is original and was probably highly unusual at the time. And the author was quite definite about his originality in an interview in March 1953 "A novelist spontaneously works out the techniques that fit his own nature..." (see the full reference in the comment section). Most of the novel is written from the perspective of Thérèse herself. Her case dismissed thanks to the perjury statement by her husband Bernard, she returns "home" to the family estate nestles among the pine forests in the Bordeaux region. On the long, slow voyage back by train and carriage, Thérèse prepares herself for her encounter with Bernard first of all. Can she find the words to explain what drove her to action to share her emotions, maybe even seek understanding and forgiveness? How will she be able to relate to husband, baby daughter and family and how will he and they treat her? Will they let her leave and disappear? Interspersed into the musings that incorporate extensive flashbacks on her earlier life, the author addresses Thérèse directly or, at times, adds his "pauvre Bernard" and other brief commentary. Eventually, Therese and Bernard meet (in chapter nine of 13) and what ensues is both predictable and unexpected.

Mauriac, no doubt, created in Thérèse a most complex and captivating character, a young woman contradictory in her behaviour and attitudes, who on the one hand knowingly entered a marriage that had as much to do with expanding her own family's landownership as with customary family requirements. Better educated than her husband, she is both a pragmatist and an idealist who can dream of a different life. She is bored with her country existence, yet seems not able to develop any emotional ties to her baby daughter. She feels some comfort during her walks in the pine forests. Mauriac's own intimate knowledge of the landscape that can be both peaceful and threatening (and threatened by fire) is palpable.

Despite visions of a visit to Paris and the free intellectual exchanges possible there, Thérèse is a woman of her (and Mauriac's) time with all the restrictions imposed on her by her surroundings and the society at large. With today's perspective we may pass a more differentiated judgement on her actions and the reasons for them. Could we excuse her actions? No, but we can possibly allow "extenuating circumstances". For the devout Catholic Mauriac, the questions of sin, confession, forgiveness and redemption, were apparently of central interest in the case. Large segments of the novel read like a confession, but who is the addressee? While references and allusions are detectable throughout, Thérèse is presented as an agnostic who seeks forgiveness in her own way and only from her victim. But then, does she really? It is up to the reader to explore the possible answers. [Friederike Knabe]
The book was received promptly and is in good condition. Since I like reading books in their original language, I hope I can obtain a few more books from this vendor.
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