15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
memorable, if rare, work, April 7, 2000
By A Customer
I read Viper's Tangle (I believe my translation was "Nest of Vipers") in high school and became fascinated with Francois Mauriac. I went on to read some of his other works, including "The Desert of Love." This work is psychological and personal in nature. If you enjoy stories which probe characters' minds, this is an excellent choice. An invalid man lies in bed, dying, remembering his life and coming to terms with it, and himself. An unknown classic. Also great if you like to collect obscure literature!
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Christian novel unafraid of psychological realism, April 13, 2008
This review is from: Viper's Tangle (Loyola Classics) (Paperback)
I am surprised that one of the reviews (referring to the AudioBook version) calls this novel sermonizing. I have read many of the Loyola classics, and I appreciate most of them as pleasantly innocuous novels with Christian themes, but of all that I have read so far, I find Viper's Tangle the most literary and the least didactic. It is also one of the most uncontrived conversion stories that I have ever read.
The protagonist of the story, a miserly old man close to death, tells of his bitterness towards his family and the world with great psychological acumen. He explains to the reader exactly how his hypocritical bourgeouis family has led him to go to great lengths in plotting to disinherit them. He despises his wife's Catholicism, and he offers an incredibly disturbing because realistic portrait of her narrow-mindedness, her failures of charity, even as he freely confesses his own wretched flaws.
What is extraordinary about the story is that his turn of heart begins to occur not as the result of an intervention by some saintly Christian character who shows him the "real meaning of faith." Small, chance discoveries occur that allow the protagonist to see his wife in a new light and allow him to realize that though she and her faith were indeed imperfect, like himself, she too hid complexities and anxieties within her. The religion that he held in contempt because it seemed so false and shallow begins to seem genuine as he gains a better picture of the role it played in her inner life, that he was too self-absorbed to see in the years she was alive.
I appreciate this book for its honest portrayal of imperfectly led Christian lives, and the (not-sermonizing) message that the individual members of the church can be both saint and sinner. To acknowledge this, even to be laid psychologically bare, with all one's faults, before a non-believer, does not discredit Christ but is evidence of his mercy.
My review may make this book sound explicitly theological, but Mauriac does not beat the reader over the head with theology. The real strength of this book is its exquisite prose and psychological realism. So many modern novels have unabashedly delved into the rottenness of the human soul, but this book gives voice to the great Hope that is Christianity, that rottenness, in all its forms and stages, does not preclude redeemability.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible!, September 7, 1999
By A Customer
A brilliant and sucessful lawyer lays dying. He ruminates over his discovery twenty years earlier that his wife had been passionately in love with another man and had married him for more practical reasons. During these twenty years, he has become more and more detached from and bitter toward his family and he spends his convalescence listening intently to the whispers of his family reaching him from downstairs. They discuss his wealth and his difficult ways.
His only consolation is the contemplation of his final triumph - when, after his death, his family rushes to the safe and instead of the stocks and bonds they are looking for, they find only a letter. The brilliant letter that makes up this incredible book.
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