Thérèse Desqueyroux

One of the things I like about L'étranger (www.letranger.co.uk) is the interesting "loose ends" within it.   On the one hand Meursault at one point cuts out an advert he finds amusing from a newspaper and sticks it into a scrapbook he uses so that he can read them again;   later on in the book he is bemused by a woman who meticulously checks off what she is going to listen to on the radio that week...not really such a huge difference-clearly the same species of being!    Later on of course she appears at the trial, representing that type of person although she plays no part in the precedings. 

Thérèse Desqueyroux feels a little bit like that with lots of aspects of the novel not really tied up;   much of the time we are not sure whom the omniscient narrator is addressing.   Do we ever really find out why Thérèse decided to poison her husband-she enquires whether ferns and the prussic acid they contain are poisonous before she marries so there is a tantalising trail of intent running through the novel.

There are contradictions which also make the reader wonder why Thérèse is so dissatisfied;  in Bernard she has got the best of the bunch as far as blokes go.   She indulges in business and political conversation alongside the men and obviously gives as good as she gets.   It's no use really speculating what she could have done with her life if she hadn't followed the course she did as the point of the novel was to get inside the skin of a woman not achieving her potential at a time when the female suffrage was still nearly twenty years away...

An extremely interesting novel to read and so much to think about, not least the narrative structure.   After the opening sequence and one or two travel details further in we don't get back to the present day in the novel's terms until two thirds of the way through the book.  

Going back to Meursault someone with whom we seek to compare our own moral compass, do we like or respect him..I don't know- and does it matter what we think?   It's a bit like that with Thérèse through whose motivation most of the plot is driven-she seems rather unpleasant;   from the word goes she gives up trying to empathise with Bernard with whom she was really keen to get married;  she is very unpleasant towards her friend Anne-it goes on.   All in all though, especially with a good film version of the book coming out, worth studying, again maybe studying the region also.

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