[Nobel laureate Mauriac's famous work, "Snake Knot" is newly translated by translator Gu Qijing.
[Pain and loneliness in a hopeless love, he repays marriage with death, and she repays fate with youth.
Nobel Prize winner - Mauriac's classic work that dissects the core of loveless marriage. It is a model of psychological analysis at the level of French literature. It influenced Camus and Sartre's "Poison Master" and wrote about the suffocation of loveless marriage with a cold writing style. When marriage is reduced to a tool of reality and interests, and when two people are forced to consume each other in the same space, intimacy becomes a mental shackles that tortures each other. The greatest pain in love is that I love your freedom and freshness, but my existence is exactly the cage that imprisons your freedom.
Jean Peruel, the son of a landowner, was young and wealthy, but ugly. As a result, he had low self-esteem and was sad, thinking that he could not be loved by the opposite sex. Jean's father regarded his son's marriage as a transaction and took a fancy to Noemi, a beautiful but poor girl from the neighbor's family. Noemi's parents also coveted Jean's family's wealth, so the two got married under the arrangement of the priest. There is no love in this marriage. Noemi's kiss is just a wife's duty, just like the kiss given by a saint to a leper, showing courtesy and mercy. Aware of Noemi's disgust and suffering, it hurt deeply, and made her feel even more painful and inferior. In order to free Noemi, whom he deeply loved, he decided to sacrifice himself to give her freedom...
Reader comments
Love castrated and distorted by religious education, the heroine's martyrical love
The most suffocating marriage is not one where they hate and fight each other, but one where they consume each other without love in the name of responsibility, both during life and after death.
Reminds me of another of his books, "The Desert of Love":
Human loneliness is hopeless, and the essence of love is a desert.
I really like the language skills of this translator, it is subtle, restrained, and expressive! Reading this book is simply a joy!
Love castrated and distorted by religious education, the heroine's martyrical love
The most suffocating marriage is not one where they hate and fight each other, but one where they consume each other without love in the name of responsibility, both during life and after death. Reminds me of another of his books, "The Desert of Love": Human loneliness is hopeless, and the essence of love is a desert.
I really like the language skills of this translator, it is subtle, restrained, and expressive! Reading this book is simply a joy!