#i'll get used to it but i have to bitch about it first. revolting. total downgrade in every sense of the word

[snowflop]

[astridofraftel]

reading challenge review #6

Just finished: Strange the dreamer by Laini Taylor + Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen + Divergent vol. 1 by Veronica Roth + Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

Currently reading: Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

Next on schedule: Le symbole perdu by Dan Brown + Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I haven't read that much these past two weeks because of the new Zelda game, which was totally justifiable, the hype was stronger than my resolve and it was totally worth it. Now I'm able to play more lightly so I have time for books! I've finished re-reading most of my indulgent additions in the first half of May, so I won't review them. However, I just finished a book that was actually on my schedule for this challenge, so I'm not late! And this one I'll review, with no real spoilers I think but don't hesitate to skip. That's right, I finally read:

Thérèse Raquin, Or: It All Could Have Been Avoided If The Characters Were Aspec (just saying)

I must have read a school edition or something because more than half of the footnotes were either unnecessary definitions or unannounced spoilers. I get that spoilers are not that big of a deal when it comes to classical literature since it’s supposed to be about skill and style, and sometimes I willfully spoil myself before getting into a classic (especially tragedies), but I like to have control over it, which I didn’t have for this one. Well, I can only blame myself, surely there exist spoiler-free editions, I bought mine because it was second-hand.

Fun fact, I challenged myself to read it in the first place because it's apparently one of the favorite books of a friend, but I procrastinated for such a long time that I'm not in contact with them anymore, oops.

I definitely freaked out for nothing about reading this one because it wasn’t as hard to read as I thought it would be. It was way lighter than the Zola novel that bored me to death in middle school (Au Bonheur des Dames), as it was shorter both in length and in exposition, and faster in pace—though I’m only talking from unreliable 10-years-old memories. I only remembered from Zola’s style his never-ending and exhausting descriptions that could go for pages on end about dull objects or sceneries with no use whatsoever to the progression of the plot. You know, like those books that are all about the ✨vibes✨ except it was in fact not my aesthetic at all. Thérèse Raquin was more bearable in this regard, more concise, even if I should properly re-read Au Bonheur des Dames to really be accurate and constructive (not gonna happen).

TR is supposed to be carried by its characters before its plot, but I could not get myself really invested in any of them, as I often fail to do when I read classics: they were selfish people, self-indulgent and self-centered, with no tangible qualities to redeem them. We're not supposed to like them, I guess, and the author said it himself: the story wasn’t actually about its characters so much as their temperaments, they were just ploys to tell a story meant to be shocking and disgusting in its displays of immorality and depravity. I wasn’t all that shocked myself, because to a modern eye the story isn’t particularly unrivaled, but I can imagine how it had been received at the time.

Zola’s preface is actually so funny on this subject, he was delighted to disgust his peers and felt superior to any revolted reader who, surely, was too stupid to understand the story. I’m not kidding, he was so salty and supercilious, such an impertinent preface would get bashed on the spot on Twitter or BookTok or something if it were published today—but to be fair it isn’t a surprising behavior from Zola (who is famous for his bigmouth if you don’t know about the whole “J’Accuse” debacle).

"Je suis charmé de constater que mes confrères ont des nerfs sensibles de jeune fille."

"I am delighted to observe that my peers have the sensitive nerves of young girls." — Emile Zola, preface to Thérèse Raquin

What a bitch

Not to look like a sensitive dunce, then, but I didn't really like this book. It's not that it was badly written, even if the writing style is rude. It's definitely not because I was shocked by the contents. I just don't agree with a lot of Zola's naturalist convictions, which I find mostly pretentious. He wrote this fiction with self-claimed scientific methods, to show-off what he thought was superior literature, and as a result there was no way I could get emotionally invested. About half-way through the story (not to say a third in), I already felt like I knew everything that would follow, and nothing ever surprised me from that point. It was almost like reading a report on an unhinged social experiment (it was also weirdly Freudian or something, idk).

To end on a positive note, I liked the tragic aspect of it all. I love reading tragedies, especially when I know they're tragedies, so the end was completely satisfactory. If I could have cared about the characters more, my view of this book might have been radically different, but I had no high expectations in the first place so it wasn't a bad read.

Now, I just need to finish re-reading my beautiful Muse of Nightmares, and then I'll begin Le symbole perdu (The Lost Symbol) by Dan Brown. I read Angels and Demons, Inferno and Da Vinci Code a few years back (in French) and I really liked them, so I don't even know why I procrastinated TLS for so long... My hopes are high, though, so it better be worth it!

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