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Therese Raquin

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Therese Raquin

By: Émile Zola
Narrated by: Traci Svendsgaard
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About this listen

 In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever.

Thérèse Raquin caused a scandal when it appeared in 1867 and brought its 27-year-old author a notoriety that followed him throughout his life. Zola's novel is not only an uninhibited portrayal of adultery, madness, and ghostly revenge but also a devastating exploration of the darkest aspects of human existence.

(P)2006 Blackstone Audiobooks Classics Marriage Haunted

Critic Reviews

"Zola's gritty portrayal of his eponymous central character Thérèse [is] a brilliantly radical departure from the simpering female prototypes of Victorian convention." (Los Angeles Times)
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I enjoyed the story and the narration. Grotesque, horror, not really scary, and surprising, detailed psychological portraits of fairly unredeemable characters - I wouldn’t have thought I would like it much but found it interesting and even amusing, and pretty easy to follow despite being from the 1860s.

Dark, psychological story

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The language in the translation was unnecessarily indirect, "Around her hung a gentle perfume of violet" -there were about 4 sentences like that in each paragraph. The narrator decided to do the characters speaking English with a French accent, but not the narrator for some reason. A lot of the narration sounded like author's notes that he hadn't written into an actual scene yet. The whole plot rested on being haunted by guilt, but without any intricacy or impact like you might get from Tolstoy or Poe. I'm suspicious that Zola thinks he knows more about the way people feel and act, than he does, from reading this.

Stilted translation, unimaginative story

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