Zola, E: Therese Raquin

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 19 mar 2013

Based on Zola's 1867 novel, and dramatized by the author in 1873, this play is almost a French version of the Russian novel, Crime and Punishment. Therese and her lover, Laurent, decide to kill her likable but sickly husband, Camille (also her husband), and succeed in doing so without arousing any suspicion. The boating accident that ends Camille's life also makes Laurent a hero for rescuing Therese. The lovers remain apart for a year, until friends of the family suggest they marry. But both are remorseful and guilt-ridden. Finally, Therese's mother discovers the truth, but suffers a stroke and cannot speak. She just stares at them, and her presence drives the lovers down the path to destruction. A powerful and believable story that plays well even today."

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Notă biografică

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, critic, and one of the central figures of literary naturalism. Best known for the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola brought an ambitious social, political, and scientific seriousness to the nineteenth-century novel, examining how heredity, environment, class, labour, money, sexuality, and institutions shape human life. His fiction often focused on the forces that polite society preferred not to see: poverty, exploitation, alcoholism, prostitution, industrial danger, political corruption, and the pressure of economic power on ordinary families.Born in Paris and raised partly in Aix-en-Provence, Zola became one of the most influential and controversial writers of modern France. Novels such as Thérèse Raquin, L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, La Bête humaine, and La Débâcle helped define naturalist fiction through their detailed social observation, unsentimental realism, and willingness to confront the physical and moral conditions of modern life. Germinal, his great novel of coal miners and class struggle, is among his most enduring works and remains a cornerstone of French literature, labour fiction, and the European realist tradition. Zola was also a major public intellectual, famously intervening in the Dreyfus Affair with "J'Accuse...!", an act that confirmed his place not only in literary history but in the history of political conscience.

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'Therese Raquin' is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere 'human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. 'Therese Raquin' stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock.