It is the kind of book you will want to read more than once.-Submitted by AnnaLaura Brown Most of the symbolism is lost in the English translations and so reading the original French is much better. It is also quite scary but at the same time very gripping and interesting. The story contains quite a bit of symbolism most of which relates to animals. It was also originally released one chapter at a time in a Parisian newspaper and then was later compiled into a novel. Therese Raquin was originally published in French by Emile Zola in the 19th century. the reader is likely to get better vaqlue here than from other translations currently in print.' Timothy Unwin, University of Western Australia, MLR, 89.Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (1853-1922). The price and format of these volumes make them an obvious choice for the reader approaching them in translation, the more so since each is accompanied by a helpful general introduction. 'Three Classic tales of sexual passion, perversion, and corruption have been added to the rapidly increasing World's Classics collection, whose repertoire of nineteenth-century French novels is now impressive. there is a thought-provoking discussion of the text's narrative structure, its symbolic and metaphorical patterns and the ways in which the author's exchanges with Manet and the Impressionists coloured his descriptions.' Joy Newton, University of Glasgow, French Studies, Vol. 'Andrew Rothwell captures the tone of Th`rése Raquin, reproducing its meodramatic overstatements, accumulations and repetitions faithfully, yet at the same time his text is inventive and abounds in felicitous touches. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. Together with the important `Preface to the Second Edition' in which Zolaĭefended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father.

Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere `human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris.

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola