In the Library
Thérèse Raquin
Émile Zola, 1867
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Edward Vizetelly
- Chapters
- Chapters 32
- Length
- Length 70k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The mouth of the young woman rested on the scar that the teeth of Camille had left on the neck of her husband.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment does the same thing, but stretches the guilt across a whole city, following a murderer's conscience unravel in real time rather than in secret.
Free in the app
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary does the same thing, but lets appetite curdle into debt and despair instead of murder, tracing how a small provincial life can poison itself from the inside.
£1.99
About the book
The Passage du Pont-Neuf is a damp arcade off the Seine where daylight comes through the glass roof already green, and in one of its shops a young woman sits behind a counter of bonnets and thread, saying nothing for years. Thérèse has been married off to the sickly cousin she was raised beside; when he brings home his friend Laurent, a big idle animal of a man, something in her that has been still since childhood comes loose. They drown Camille in the Seine on a boating afternoon, and the rest of the novel is what the water gives back. Zola said he was studying temperaments, not souls, working on living bodies as a surgeon works on corpses, and he meant it: Laurent at the Morgue every morning among the drowned, the bite on his neck that will not heal, a marriage bed with a third body in it. There is no God in this book to judge them, and no need of one: the punishment is nervous, physical, and comes up out of their own skins.