Customer Reviews

Viper's Tangle (Loyola Classics)

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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!

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.

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.

I was very grateful when Ignatius Press sent a copy of this book to me to review for Catholicfiction.net. It's truly a "lost masterpiece," as other reviewers have noted. I thought I'd share a truncated version of my original review, as I feel this book deserves to be read by anyone who appreciates deep, if dark, stories with a profound spiritual element. Indeed, "Vipers' Tangle" is structured as a lengthy confession--sometimes a confession, sometimes a polemic, sometimes an invective--from Monsieur Louis, a wealthy retired lawyer of declining health who feels surrounded by a nest of vipers, his family. Yet the vipers' tangle is within as well as without.

The story bears a passing resemblance to Dickens' classic, "A Christmas Carol": a rich, "covetous old sinner" struggles against God's grace to find redemption. But where Dickens' tale had its author's infectious good-humor and largeness of spirit, Vipers' Tangle is an often disturbing journey to the heart of an odious man's mystery. In both stories, however, the ultimate point is that God's grace is accessible to anyone, even the most miserly old sinner.

Through his barrister narrator, a man very difficult character to stomach much less love, Mauriac is making a case of his own. By presenting the reader with a malevolent old man on his deathbed, the author's case is simply this: no one is beyond the reach of God's grace. Without romanticizing Louis, Mauriac expresses the tragedy of a wasted life, the tragedy of a man who has closed himself off from a community of love to wallow in his own despair. Louis is sinned against as well as sinning, but he reserves many of his harshest judgments for himself. He is honest, not hypocritical, and he often turns his cruelty inwards. There is a telling moment when someone asks the local priest if it is permissible to hate the Jews. He replies that "each of us has the right to hate one of Christ's butchers, and one only--himself, but no one else."

"Vipers' Tangle" is an eschatological meditation on the final things, the moment of death. "Apocalypse" is a popular subject for many sensationalistic religious thrillers, but the fact remains that every person's death is his or her own apocalypse--the end of the world. Though unsentimental, Mauriac's vision of one lonely man's last days is hopeful. As Death approaches Louis, the material universe begins to slough away, to diminish in importance as it recedes behind him. The essential drama of Catholic fiction (and why so many great writers are Catholic or have catholic sensibilities) is not whether a character dies--we all die--but whether a character dies in a state of grace. High stakes make for compelling stories, and no stake is higher than the condition of one's eternal soul. Choices in this life have repercussions in the next.

Mauriac asks the reader to bear with his bitter, cruel narrator. He even implicates the reader in Louis' sin-ridden life by suggesting that love requires patience and understanding--a willingness to reach out to souls in torment. "Even the genuinely good cannot, unaided, learn to love. To penetrate beyond the absurdities, the vices, and above, the stupidities of human creatures, one must possess the secret of a love that the world has now forgotten."

François Mauriac was a profoundly Catholic novelist. He didn't write pious stories of the Saints or of holy priests and nuns. He wrote stories about people who lived dark, dissolute lives; who hurt others and themselves; but who are offered redemption.

He won the Nobel prize for literature, but in a modern, atheistic France is barely feted.

Le noeud de vipères is, to my mind, his greatest novel. The story of a husband who treats his wife and family with utter disdain, verging on hatred; a man with a blackened heart, but for whom his impending death brings new insights and the possibility of redemption.

It remains one of the greatest books I have ever read.

If you prefer to read it in the original French, le voilà: Le Noeud de Viperes (French Edition)

I loved this novel, and plan now to read more Mauriac. The story revolves around an aging lawyer, who is fully aware of how damaged and distorted his soul had become, who is writing a letter to his wife. Through this letter, the man is revealed with all his selfishness and cynicism, but who toward the end begins to become less grasping, less controlling, and less hateful. It is as if he is gradually letting to of the demons that possessed his soul for all of his life.

This is a story of redemption. But it is not a soft or sentimental. Nor is it pious or in any way manipulative. Rather, it is the story of a man coming to terms with the evil in his soul, and in the end beginning to let go.

I picked up the Vipers' Tangle in a "free book box" outside a small, Alaskan library. For weeks I had passed it by, put off by the cover blurb that described it as a "great Catholic novel". I was not sure how much in common I would have with a Catholic book. A few weeks later, the thin volume remained in the "free book box". Many others had passed over it as well. I glanced at it again and read a note that Mauriac had been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. That settled it; I was gonna read this "Catholic" novel.

Much to my surprise, I found it to be extremely subtle. I had expected a "Catholic" novel to be focused on the Catholic religion, but I am not sure what makes this book "Catholic". As far as I remember, Jesus Christ is never mentioned once. The thematic elements that could be construed as "religious" are slowly rolled into the narrative with little notice from the reader. From the beginning, the reader gets pushed and shoved by the voice of the narrator. This never really lets up. You are stuck with this guy. But his voice becomes the aether upon which all the other elements hang. [I noticed that one reviewer of this book was unable to read more than 60 pages of this guy complaining about his life. I understand how she felt, but I found the narrative too compelling to put the book down].

This novel isn't about a "journey" or a "process". There isn't some miraculous scene of forgiveness, love, or redemption. Instead, the reader is left with a hint of perfume in the room; it is really too little to notice, but nevertheless you'll smell it and wonder if the Lord had just walked through the room, behind your back, while you were reading.

This is my second Mauriac novel, the first being Woman of the Pharisees, and I enjoyed it immensely. Louis, an aging lawyer, writes a letter to his wife in which he recounts their life together. What begins as a reproach against his family turns into a sort of examination of conscience. The novel ends with a series of exchanges between his grown up children as they offer their own interpretation of his writing. Did Louis amend his ways or were the changes he seemed to be undergoing just another layer of self-deception? Or are the children themselves rationalizing his motives? Mauriac's psychological novel exemplifies the Socratic wisdom that the "unexamined life is not worth living."

"Viper's Tangle" is on the short list of best Catholic novels ever written -- and it may indeed be the best. This is a penetrating study of one man's dark character -- and how grace finally penetrates and transforms him. It's a powerful work, that left a very deep impression on me. In short, a great book.

The day-to-day struggles of human existence are quite difficult for many people, and for others, they are a marvelling pleasure, and why is that? What sets one group of humanity apart from the other whereby their only connection is the gossamer thread of humanism? It is faith in Jesus Christ and how that faith is utilized in the molding and or sculpting of humanism to hopeful, healthy perfection. Yet, too, what are the molding tools that are used in the vast dichotomy of that living? The universal tool is love and sacrifice, and that is a no-holds-bar truth which is ardently championed by the Holy Catholic Church. But there are many impediments and or blockages of our own making, because we either fail or simply choose not to see the universality of that global truth, for in the acknowledging of that, it means giving up an element of one's vital self to it, and that is where we are constantly at odds; it is frightening; it requires too much; it is overwhelming; it is too good to be true, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes we learn that lesson early in life, and sometimes we learn in the very end. It does not matter at what age one accepts that truth, as long as one does, and in the novel Viber's Tangle, the character Louis accepts it before he meets his Father, a gift from the Mysterious, a humble yet grateful yes in return. There are so many stumbling blocks that prevent people from being genuine religious carriers of faith, and for Monsieur Louis, it is greed and the evolution of it from being one of a good, practical necessity into a self-serving tactical weapon by which to negatively dominate over the lives of others; he could not see beyond his own creation and perception-the viper's tangle that surrounded his heart and soul-skewering the reality of the more careful loving domination that had easy attention on him all the while but which he chose to coldly mock and ignore, and as such, his evolvement through career and family was nothing more but an appendage to a miserable life of his own free will and making. And Love, who is Christ Jesus, is not a word or simply an experience. He is a fact. And Louis's conversion to that truth where he sees that the Word and the Man are not separated but are in actuality one-in-the-same, is a moving reading experience. In the excellent introduction by Robert Coles, he makes mention that the author wanted the reader to feel pity and be moved by the character's predicament, which is not so easy, because his deplorableness is easier to latch on to. Francois Mauriac makes it very easy for his literary creation to be despised. But upon reading the concise language and deft plotting, there is an evolution that takes place from dislike, to pity, to hope, to change, to cheering, to Love. And in the end, is that not all to whom we desire to return to?