Victorine: A Novel [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Catherine Texier (Author), Jurian Hughes (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2004

In her memoir, Breakup, Catherine Texier tells how her husband left her for another woman. In Victorine, Texier takes the memory of Victorine, her maternal great-grandmother, and transforms it, so that Victorine, in the throes of a grand passion, leaves her husband and children for another man. Naturally, Victorine's motives are soulful, and yet she has committed a mother's ultimate sin. Her flight with her lover to turn-of-the-century Indochina leads to days of great beauty and nights of sensuous languor, along the banks of the Mekong River. At the same time, she has much time to muse about the struggle between duty and independence, tradition and freedom, longing and regret. All of these thoughts are now condensed into a single day: a day when she has returned.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Texier, author of the 1998 memoir Breakup and three previous novels (Panic Blood, etc.), spins a steely, delicate fictional tale of unaccounted-for years in the life of her own great-grandmother, Victorine, who was rumored to have run off with a customs officer in the late 1890s, leaving behind her husband and two children in Vendee, France. Victorine first met Antoine when she was 16; she was soon to become the youngest teacher in France, and he was intent on venturing to one of the French colonies. As Victorine settles into her work, she meets dark-eyed fellow teacher Armand Texier and pushes Antoine into the recesses of her memory. She and Armand marry in a hurry when Victorine becomes pregnant, but years later, Victorine meets Antoine again and plans rendezvous with him, feeling a "shameful pleasure at the idea that her secret evened out the power" between herself and her womanizing husband. After some deliberation, Victorine agrees to leave her family to move to Indochina with Antoine, where he guarantees to "show [her] a world that [she] will fall in love with." She leaves without confronting her husband or children, and immediately begins to feel regret. As she wrestles with the prospect of contacting her sister, who also lives in Indochina, or even her family back in Vendee, Victorine remains entrenched in a "split reality" where she must convince herself that the present can, in fact, always be reinvented. Texier offers seamless transitions between the past and present, and even the future as an older Victorine reflects upon her days in the Mekong Delta. Lurking questions of empire and expansion lend an extra dimension to this bittersweet romance, reminiscent both of Madame Bovary and Duras's The Lover, making plain the temptations and risks of expanding beyond one's borders.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Texier based this mesmerizing novel on the family legends surrounding her great-grandmother, Victorine, who left her husband for a year in 1899. At 16, Victorine was the youngest schoolteacher in all of France, but her father's dreams for her are dashed when she meets Armand Texier and becomes pregnant at 17. The couple marries hastily and settles into a life in Vendee with their two children. But Victorine is never completely satisfied, and when handsome Antoine, a man she loved as a girl, reenters her life, he ignites a deep passion in Victorine. When he tells her he is going to Indochina, he asks her to go with him. She does, and she travels to a world where she is able to reinvent herself. But Victorine has never been a woman to fall easily into any one role, and she finds herself as out of place in Indochina as she thought she was in Vendee. With lush, vivid description, Texier brings to life both the world around Victorine and the woman herself. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (April 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739310747
• ISBN-13: 978-0739310748
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,653,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "She closes her eyes. She cannot remember more.", June 4, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Victorine: A Novel (Hardcover)

Victorine is an absolutely gorgeous novel. Lucid, poetic, romantic and sensual, the story tells of one young woman's defiance of social convention in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Victorine, a young schoolteacher, lives in Vendee, a quiet province of France. She becomes pregnant at an early age to Armand, and in keeping with the propriety of the time, is forced to marry him. But Victorine's heart is with the blond, virile wonderer, Antoine, and in a fit of lust and abandon, she embarks on a highly passionate affair. Falling desperately in love, and trapped in a loveless marriage that is like an "ever-tightening corset," Victorine abandons her husband and her two children, Madeleine and Daniel. Together with her new lover, and tormented by guilt and remorse, she travels to Indochina to start a new life.

Told in a type of duel narrative that effectively switches backwards and forwards in time - from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen forty - we journey back with Victorine to her home in France with her family, and to her adventures with Antoine along the Mekong River. Victorine is torn between the question of love and the question of marriage, and for her, marriage for love seems to be forever rendered moot. But she can't resist Antoine's desire and ends up defying the entire social rules that she's been bought up with. She describes herself as "always cold in the early winters" of her marriage and she wonders if there is something amiss in her heart. It is as though she has kept the feelings of Antoine's "fingers on her wrist buried under the smooth surface of her life."

The novel is quite compelling because of the power of its thought and its writing, and it steadily crescendos towards Victorine's decision to abandon Armand and her children. Her small, original lies gradually blossom into elaborate stories as she tries desperately to keep her affair with Antoine a secret from her family. She realizes she's only buying time in a land of "fuzzy boundaries" where truth - already a shaky concept, gradually gets corrupted, and irremediably altered. Texier has crafted a complex portrait of a woman who is a dreamer longing to escape, and who is irrevocably bound by stuffy conventions.

Texier's style is deceptively reserved, quietly crafted, and with a simple beauty that is impossible not to like. Witness the "sun melting in apricot trails along the horizon," and the "moonlight playing silver circles on her naked arms." And the colours of Indochina: yellow stucco and green shutters, the smells of frangipani, jasmine, overripe mangos, and dried fish.

Texier writes throughout with a fine ear for the sound and rhythms of her sentences and there is a constant pleasure in reading her prose. She also has a way of describing Victorine's sensuality while managing to avoid judging her actions. Like the loosening of her corset, which she does with a sigh of relief, her sensuality awakens and also becomes loose; it suddenly appears to her as an object of desire, "dangerously intimate and precarious." Victorine is a gorgeous evocation of a time and place and is a startling account of one woman's search for independence and freedom from the oppressive restrictions of the time. Mike Leonard June 04.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read, May 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Victorine: A Novel (Hardcover)

I feel compelled to write this review for a few reasons. One is that I absolutely loved this novel. It is beautifully written, impossible to put down and extremely evocative. Another reason, is that I have read 2 reviews condemning Ms. Texier for being "too gentle" with her main character, "Victorine." Yes, this is a story about a woman who has an affair and painfully decides to leave her children to pursue a relationship with her lover in, what was then, Indochina. Ms. Texier makes no apologies or excuses for Victorine. As a woman it was very hard for me to read the section where she finally leaves her children. I just couldn't understand it-as much as I was excited by her new love, I could not accept that she would just abandon her children. But it doesn't matter if it made me uncomfortable or if I would not go down the same path. It wasn't Ms. Texier's job as a writer to soften the blow or to pass judgement and she didn't; and I respect her for this. There is love and excitement and amazing descriptions in this novel but there is also an overwhelming sense of sadness that can be felt through-out. Possibly because the novel is really Victorine looking back on her life, as an older woman; so her memories are shaded with the knowledge of what was to come. "Victorine" is hauntingly beautiful and just a wonderful read! I highly recommend!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars if you like books, check this out, May 2, 2004

By 

joe leone - See all my reviews

This review is from: Victorine: A Novel (Hardcover)

this novel is not your typical love story, where we follow the heroine down a predictable path in order to achieve happiness in the standard sense. Victorine is a torn women who sacrifices something dear to her, with the goal of escaping her mediocre and monotonous life. The result is a tumultuous ride through an exotic land, ending not as you might think. The book is phenonmenal, if not just for the crafty prose, than for the mere fact that the author takes a huge risk: She gives us a main character whose actions we might not agree with, but makes us root for her regardless. The tale is extraordinary, but there is a certain sensibilty to this book that undeniably conveys the angst that comes from the human condition. Read this book, it will leave you with a poignant, yet fresh perspective on life.