Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

Overview

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola naît rue Saint-Joseph à Paris le 2 avril 1840 d'un père italien et d'une mère française. Il est le fils unique de François Zola, natif de Venise, et d'Émilie Aubert, native de Dourdan. Son père, ingénieur de travaux publics, ancien officier subalterne italien, soumissionne la construction d'un système d'amenée d'eau potable à Aix-en-Provence. Il crée avec des partenaires financiers la société du canal Zola. Il meurt de pneumonie en 1847. Émilie Aubert, sa mère, totalement démunie, s'occupe de l'orphelin avec la grand-mère de l'enfant, Henriette Aubert. Restée proche de son fils jusqu'à sa mort en 1880, elle a fortement influencé son oeuvre et sa vie quotidienne.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781726439756
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	08/31/2018
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.46(d)
Language:	French

About the Author

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.

Editorial Reviews

English actor Juliet Stevenson’s nuanced performance of this classic tale of obsession lures listeners into a nineteenth-century Parisian storefront, where lust and shadows lurk. Unhappily married to her sickly cousin, Camille, and working in her aunt’s dingy clothing store, Thérèse Raquin starts an affair with Camille’s colleague. After murdering Camille, the lovers are haunted to the point of madness by their crime. Stevenson’s straightforward narration exemplifies Zola’s famously scientific approach to storytelling, which studied “temperaments, not personalities.” The book has little dialogue, releasing Stevenson from inventing French accents, but when needed, her pronunciation of the Parisian streets and neighborhoods is perfect. Her vibrant alto pitch, crystalline enunciation, and expressive reading enliven Zola’s descriptive writing, sending listeners deep into Paris’s underworld. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MAY 2022 - AudioFile

English actor Juliet Stevenson’s nuanced performance of this classic tale of obsession lures listeners into a nineteenth-century Parisian storefront, where lust and shadows lurk. Unhappily married to her sickly cousin, Camille, and working in her aunt’s dingy clothing store, Thérèse Raquin starts an affair with Camille’s colleague. After murdering Camille, the lovers are haunted to the point of madness by their crime. Stevenson’s straightforward narration exemplifies Zola’s famously scientific approach to storytelling, which studied “temperaments, not personalities.” The book has little dialogue, releasing Stevenson from inventing French accents, but when needed, her pronunciation of the Parisian streets and neighborhoods is perfect. Her vibrant alto pitch, crystalline enunciation, and expressive reading enliven Zola’s descriptive writing, sending listeners deep into Paris’s underworld. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MAY 2022 - AudioFile