Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

The central hero in this novel has got a name quite similar to mine - he`s called Raymon. The novel revolves around two scenes in his life and concerns a weird polygone of love. Let`s start with the earliest episode. Raymon was an unsecure teenager in a family of a doctor. He wasn`t aware of his good looks and had he lived in the modern age he`d be probably called a goth for he wasn`t the most cheerful person in town. His life took an unexpected twist when he met Mary Cross on a tram. She was a woman of a very doubtful statue despised by many because of her affair with an elder man from the high classes. What Raymon wasn`t aware of was the fact that Mary was a patient of his father`s and that his father was unhopefully in love with her (she on the contrary didn`t notice his love considering him a saint). But that didn`t stop Mary from devoting a passion towards the young Raymon and almost seducing him (Raymon learned to understand that he wasn`t a freak after all but he blew everything about their possible romance by his foolish teenagers behaviour). After everything came to a logical conclusion Raymon still had a lot of bitterness towards Mary who had rejected him and planned to revenge himself by becoming a victor in the battle for many womens` hearts. He succeeded at that but when he met Mary some 15 years later he learned to know that he hadn`t come over his passion towards her (she didn`t see in him anything at all anymore) and that his father was also still mad for her. So they both - father and son who had never understood each other were tied by this woman that didn`t care for either of them. Sad, sad, sad.

Mr. Moriac represents the old school of French literature yet he`s also deeply connected with the new one - he ain`t really as modern as Prouste but he doesn`t care about the action like the old school writers did. "Therese" is the story of a woman that`s married without love and that tries to poison her husband without a one good reason - but because she`s dissatisfied with her life and that her ideals lie with a weird Jewish guy who doesn`t care about her (or anyone else as a matter of fact). So the novel is probably what Therese would tell to a priest in terms of her sins or something like that. Quite touching, not too touching though. Mauriac got a Nobel prize by the way.

It was the second Mauriac`s novel I read in just a few days so the writer was no mystery man to be at the moment of the opening fraze of this novel. In this novel he also shows how social things mean quite a lot to him, depicting the bourgeouis idille in a way even commie writers wouldn`t be ashamed of. The central person of this book is an old rich man who writes a goodbye letter to his family that he despises and that is afraid of him and that hates him. The old man isn`t really a nice person, but most of his relatives are even worse, they all are perverts of some sort; they don`t sodomize, of course, but there`s really very little in all those peoples` lives. In the end the old man suddenly finds some inner peace/harmony which has to do with the fact that he`s already dying, on the other hand it doesn`t really influence anything a lot. I`ll probably never turn into a huge fan of this fellow but I can appreciate his work for sure.

I don`t know why but the records in this factoid tend to get smaller and smaller day by day. Once I used to write long sentences about everything concerning the book/film/album in question but nowadays it`s basically a one-liner with very little meaning. It may be me losing the faith in my factoid or I`ve just been too tired lately to come up with long descriptions even for books I`ve liked (since a book provides much more ground for a long discussion than a musical disc). Francois Mauriac has become quite a common name on this factoid although I have a lot of doubt whether I really like him. I read the first two novels because I happened to find a book by a French writer whom I didn`t know on a shelf at home. After that I completely forgot that Mauriac existed at all until I was at my girlfriends place and had nothing to read. So I made an inspection of books there and noticed a familiar name. This novel`s title can be probably translated into English as "The monkey". It`s the story of a child of 12 living in a castle with his aristocrate parents (his mother wasn`t actually an aristrocrate but the mayor`s daughter) who hated each other, the young boy lived worse than most of his peers despite being particulary rich on paper. He wasn`t a smart fellow by all means - he barely was able to read and write but the main thing he lacked in his life was love - nobody loved him for he was just an unwanted abuse for his mother who was ashamed of having such a child, while his father was a bit of an idiot and mostly just didn`t care. The mother tried to convince the local school teahcer to give private lessons to her son (in fact she only hoped to have an affair with the teacher). First the teacher found out that the boy wasn`t as terrible as it had seemed to him in the beginning but after a longer consideration he refused to take the boy which led to the monkey understanding that he was unwanted once again. And in the end the father drowned himself and took the boy with him for he saw that there was no place in the world for either of them. Sad, sad, sad.

The story is as old as the world itself. Allen, the main hero of this novel (which is written from the first persons perspective as some kind of a diary) becomes the only heir of a very big amount of land when his brother suddenly dies. Being in the age of circa 20 years and not interested in his heritage at all Allen wants to pursue a much more spiritual life than that of a rich landlord. Still he can`t escape from the immense influence his mother has over him, and he knows that one day he will marry a girl who`s just 12 now but who also will inherit lots and lots of land. His life suddenly changes when he meets a woman working at a bookstore (he`s some kind of a reading freak). Although the woman is some 10 years older than he is and much wiser they become lovers (in the spiritual form of the word) and Allen is almost ready to break free from his mother. But he fails, despite the help by the woman (who doesn`t want to become his wife knowing that because of her troubled past she will be only a burden to a man of his statue) and a six-fingered man who almost became a priest but was much closer to becoming a lost soul. When everything seems to be lost it only gets worse - Allen suddenly finds a crush in himself on the 12 year old girl after seing her bathing naked in a lake but she knowing how much he hated her before runs into the woods where she gets raped and murdered by a local farmer.