Emile Zola: Therese Raquin

 I am, perhaps more than most, a very susceptible reader.  I find myself, without meaning to or resisting, absorbing whatever I encounter, including books, movies, and people.  After reading a nineteenth century novel, I am far more likely to use "whence" in an email than not, and equally likely to refer to somebody as "gurl" after watching RuPaul's Drag Race.  The other day I got into a lengthy and, at times, heated conversation with a black friend about the extent to which it was appropriate for me to use snippets of AAVE in our conversation.

So it is not a surprise at all that my take on this book is heavily colored by the movies I watched this week, specifically Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak and El Espinazo del Diablo.  On almost every page, I saw Zola's gruesome and vivid prose as filmed by that auteur, and speculated how the latter might revel in filming the water-logged greens and creeping, malevolent reds found there.  Camille's corpse especially lends itself to  Del Toro's take on ghost stories, never jumping or shrieking cheaply at the reader, but waiting in clear view and all the more sinister for it.

And what made the book ever so slightly dissatisfying was, or seemed to be in my heavily influenced mind, the same as that which occasionally detracts from Del Toro.  Especially in Crimson Peak, though the journey never seems false or contrived, it is often far too clear.  In watching that movie, it was not clear how the doomed siblings would die, or at whose hand, but the journey they would take to get there, and the process the movie would go through, was certain from the beginning.

Likewise in Therese Raquin, one couldn't say for certain whether the two murderous lovers would die at each other's hands, at the scaffold, or, as was ultimately the case, by their own hands.  It was certain, however, what steps would take them there.  Even though Zola crafted every moment flawlessly, once it became apparent where the story was going, I found myself less interested in arriving.