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Text: English, French (translation)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lady Chatterley in reverse,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Sin of Father Mouret (Paperback)
This book, number five in the Rougon-Macquart saga and the sequel to "The Conquest Of Plassans", is really quite unique in French literature. In a way, you could say it's a forerunner of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the sexes reversed. A young and very devoted priest is nursed back to health after illness and has his sensual passions aroused in a big way by a teenage girl living virtually alone in a huge, century-old abandoned walled garden. Add to this a fire-and-brimstone friar, an intellectually-challenged younger sister, a kindly doctor of an uncle and the earthy animal spirits of southern French country life as a background to it all and you have something special, even if the final outcome of the love affair is unbelievable. Full of poetry, passion, symbolism and Zola's usual intoxicating powers of description, but not the book you'll find serialized in your local church magazine. Well worth reading as it shows that Zola's craft as a writer has fully matured but he has yet to find the subject to hit the big time sales-wise.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A BOLD ATTACK ON RELIGION,
By myshiak (washington, dc) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sin of Father Mouret (Hardcover)
Serge Mouret, a Roman Catholic priest unable to suppress his carnal desires first develops a spiritual devotion for Virgin Mary, which leaves him unsatisfied. Instead, it is Albine, a niece of an old man, who occupies a once abandoned and then burned down palace, surrounded by survived flourishing gardens and cascades, with whom Serge develops a full-fledged love relationship. Nevertheless, torn between carnal desires and religious prejudices, Serge abandons Albine and the profuse Paradou garden and returns to the church. He ends up being guilty in the death of his beloved. The question is: what is Serge Mouret's fault? Is it in him betraying the postulates of religion or in him abandoning the earthly joys? We see two outlooks on life. The first outlook is renouncing everything earthly in the name the Beyond. The second outlook is the joyous perception of life and admiring the world and the nature in all its diversity. Mouret is torn between the two outlooks and his internal struggle ends with a fault, but not against the religious dogma, rather, against sensuous joys. One must say that there are things in life other than the utopian Paradou. The Artaud village, which it neighbors is populated with savage people. Their brutish instincts contradict the beauty of life. So, which is right? Is it the religion and the Beyond or is it the diverse life, in which brutish and lyrical things coexist? The symbolic end of the novel (Albine's death and Serge Mouret's retarded sister Desiree proclaiming with joy the birth of a calf) convincingly proves the superiority of the material perception of the everyday life over religious superstitions.
1.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointing departure from Naturalism,
By
This review is from: The Sin of Father Mouret (Hardcover)
Of the twenty books in the Rougon-Macquart series, this (the fifth book) is one of my least favorites. It is uncharacteristic of Zola's writing style, and doesn't read like a part of the series at all. The book starts out well enough. Zola describes the small village of Les Artauds where Serge Mouret serves as parish priest, the lives of its none-too-pious inhabitants, and the role the Church plays in their everyday lives. I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that the Sin mentioned in the title is that he falls in love with a woman. From there the book goes downhill. Zola abandons his trademark naturalism for a less realistic style that seems to be a throwback to earlier symbolist literature. The characters are largely allegorical. We see them as symbols for "Religion" or "Nature", rather than as three-dimensional human beings. Perhaps it's just my perspective as a twenty-first century reader that makes it hard for me to identify with two characters frolicking in an enchanted garden. The love affair is too idyllic, to the point of tedium. The book feels like a short story that has been drawn out to the length of a novel. Or perhaps it would have worked better as a poem, considering the bulk of the love scenes are comprised of long descriptive passages about nature. Those who want to tackle the entire Rougon-Macquart series should (and will, of course) read this book. Others should avoid it.
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