Julian Barnes writes in The Guardian about going back to read Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, because the play was about to open at the National Theatre. He finds that 150 years after it was written, the novel — about two lovers who kill a husband and by killing the husband kill their own desire and then themselves — is still “as shocking as ever.” And I agree. I’ve never forgotten it.

I first read it as a literature undergrad. What was it, 1989, 90? Then, a year or two later, I took it with me during a semester break when my then boyfriend and I spent a week in an apartment by the beach. On second reading I was looking for how to transform it into a screenplay. I check my bookcase here in Greece and see that I’ve brought that copy of the book with me from Sydney, but as I look through it now nothing in it betrays the emotion I felt back then, more than a decade ago. All I find are plot points noted in pencil on the top of each sheet of paper (Laurent and Therese meet; They discuss murder; Laurent nervous, both suffering; Fear of the ghost), and a thorough underlining of conversation and action.

I now remember that there is a notebook somewhere, the notebook I took with me that semester break in which I recorded responses to the novel. It must be lost though. Nevertheless, however forceful the novel was back then, over the years it became subdued, forgotten, lost somewhere in that pit of the unconscious.

My student copy of the Zola novel was the classic penguin edition. I bought it second hand from Gleebooks for 3.95 Australian dollars (I only remember that because the price is marked on the inside cover). The front cover shows a detail from Edouard Vuillard’s ‘Under the Lamplight,’ a woman hunched over a desk, blurry profile on view. That hidden face was all I had of the woman who was Thérèse Raquin.

Julian Barnes’s copy was “was an old Livre de Poche edition with a lime-green cover; the page edges had originally been stained lime green to match, but were now long faded to brown.”

He writes that his memory of it had faded, too. All he remembered of it was: “a murder (though of whom and why?), a scene in the Paris morgue (though this might have been a contamination from a later BBC adaptation of the book), and a general sense of physical and moral dankness - the leprous walls and leprous souls of lower-depths Paris.”

I too had forgotten much of the novel, but when I embarked on an affair with a married man the memory of it returned with such force that I became manic. Haunted, even. All I knew was that I had to find the book, had to find the story, the terrible story of Thérèse and Laurent. And I knew that when I found it I had to get my lover to read it. He had to read it. There was an important message in it. Oh, it wasn’t a message about morals and the ethics of infidelity. How trite! We believed our love was a great love and it was our ethical duty to sustain it! The message in Zola’s dark little tale was one of imminent danger. We were in danger. Our single act of infidelity had already changed everything and the marriage was over. But, I remember thinking, if we had killed the marriage, and by killing the marriage, murdered the wife, (metaphorically of course!), were we in danger of the same terrible destiny of Thérèse and Laurent?

I found a copy of the book in a secondhand bookstore in Monastiraki, Athens. It was a 1922 edition translated into the Greek by a man called Leon Pavlidis.

The book is in my hands now — it is light and its pages are rough — and the lover to whom it was given is now my husband.

I open it, search for any marginalia that would bring back more memories of that time.

Julian Barnes, as he begins re-reading the novel, notes the marginalia, too: “Those 37-year-old marginalia provoked the usual mixed feelings. On the one hand, you fear to discover that your younger self was an idiot; on the other, you need to believe that all your subsequent years as a reader and then writer have made your literary responses sharper and deeper.”

The Greek copy of Zola now in my hands offers up next to nothing: only my husband’s typical imprint, the initials, place, and date. And then there’s my utterly banal Σ’αγαπώ ρε!.

Is that all?

I can attest that it was a feverish time, the time spent reading that book. I remember the day we found it. A sunny, happy day, we were in Athens, a Sunday, we’d read the papers with coffee at Monastiraki, and then we browsed through the flea market and the junk stores.

When I found the book I was relieved. I held in both my hands, and like a practised rhetorician, I presented my argument to him: that we risked losing this μεγάλο έρωτα, this great love. I pushed the book towards him and said: Just read the book.

And he did. In one long marathon read. I remember the final pages, he read them at the bar in Plaka, I think it was at Philomousa Cafe. I sat opposite him, leaning over the book in front of him, waiting for the verdict - would we end up like them?

Again, it wasn’t some abstract moral retribution I feared, it was something else. The whole process of infidelity, divorce, and everything that comes with it is physically exhausting. It’s like going to hell. It is hell. Would we be able to survive the physical and mental toll? The guilt, mental and physical discomfort, all of that which manifests itself in psychosomatic disorders: insomnia, depression, nervous ticks (I saw that in a friend going through the same ordeal), irritability. Julian Barnes clarifies:

Such a summary may make the novel sound a moral tale. It is the very opposite. Zola sets himself up as a scientific examiner of the human condition and of this particular psychological case: “I have simply done on two living bodies the kind of analysis that surgeons do on dead bodies.” He aims to strip away the normal (false, literary) manner of describing people to get at the truth of “the human mechanism”. Though Thérèse and Laurent suffer as a consequence of murdering Thérèse’s feeble, ailing husband Camille, they do so not in the way a traditional, moralising novelist might wish them to. “What I have been obliged to call their remorse,” Zola wrote, “consists of no more than a simple organic disorder.” The couple’s guilt is entirely “physical” (ie nervous - hallucinations, hauntings, exhaustion) and not in any way “mental” (ie moral): so Laurent, placed into the same situation again, would do - admits he would do - exactly the same thing and murder Camille all over again.

and:

In this, the young Zola was under the profound influence of the “philosopher of naturalism”, Hippolyte Taine. To the second edition of Thérèse Raquin, Zola added as epigraph Taine’s dictum: “Vice and virtue are just as much products as are vitriol and sugar.” Products, that is, of environment, inheritance, history and the momentum of the age. The human problem was one not of God and morality, but of psychological mechanics, which could be studied and solved just as a problem in physical mechanics could.

We suffered many physical and psychological consequences, but overcame them. Our act of killing a marriage and a wife, metaphorically, was not so terrible in the end as Laurent’s and Thérèse’s literal murder. Our symptoms, then, were markedly less acute.