Bokrecension: Therese Raquin av Emilé Zola

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Summary:
The book ” Thérèse Raquin” is a story Mrs. Raquin, her son Camille and her adoptive daughter Thérèse. They are a middleclass family who lives on the rent from saved money. When Thérèse gets older she has to marry Camille. After that Thérèse, Camille and Mrs. Raquin move to Paris, where they open a store. Thérèse don’t want to be married to Camille, she’s very unhappy with the situation. He is often weak and always seems to be sick.
Every Thursday, the family meets their friends over a dinner, and they play domino. One day, a new man enters the house, Laurent. Thérèse finds him very attractive, and they soon become lovers. Their meetings are secret, of course. From the beginning, they are very discreet, but after a while, Thérèse gets more and more incautious.
The novel is set in the end of the 1800-century in France. It effects the story, because the author describes France in that epoch so well, so after reading the book, it feels like you’ve been to France!
Characters:
The book describes the characters very well. It feels like I’ve met them and know them well. Thérèse is shy and very reserved. She’s not that kind of person who sits and talks to unknown people. She does hardly know what to say.
Camille is social. He doesn’t have many opinions about thing, if it’s not about his job, which he adores. The new job open new doors for him!
Laurent is pretty happy with the situation, even before he and Thérèse become lovers. They give him food, Camille’s mother adores him, Laurent to, and he knows that Thérèse wants him.

Thérèse and Laurent starts to wonder how they will get Camille out of their way, so their love can be official. Without Camille, their love would be even more beautiful than it already was. They decide to kill Camille. The couple get the chance to murder her husband under a boat outing. Laurent hits Camille, and they start to fight. Camille even managed to bite Laurent before the weak Camille drowns in the flood.
They succeed to get away without any suspicious thoughts from the police. A while after the mourning, they get married. But the marriage is a total failure. Every time they’re about to make love, they ghost of Camille comes to visit them, make them thinking about the terrible murder. Soon, Thérèse gets very sick, and it ends up with a paralysis. Laurent spend all their money on alcohol and prostituted.
Soon, Mrs. Raquin gets to know what happened to Camille, and she decides to get revenge for it. At the same time, the pain and the afflicting get worse. It’s to muck for Thérèse and Laurent, so they takes their lives.

Analysis:
I do believe that he has worked a long time with this book. It feels like that, because everything seems so carefully written.
This book title only points to the name of the main character. That’s sad, it could have been called “Lust and disgust”.
Émile Zola doesn’t give the readers any space to think. He has already described everything so well, so you don’t have to figure anything out on your own. Every room, person, and body – everything is so in detail described!
I love this book, maybe just because you just don’t have to think about everything, the people and the surroundings is already described in the book. It was hard to read, because the language is old, after all it’s written in the middle of the 1800-century.
The theme in the book is love, horror, regret and revenge. It starts with a very beautiful love story. But the love dies and the horror and regret comes. In the end of the book, Camille’s mother gets her r...