François Mauriac: Le Désert de l’amour (The Desert of Love)

The latest addition to my website is François Mauriac‘s Le Désert de l’amour (The Desert of Love). While it does have Mauriac’s trademark doom and gloom, it also has a (very slight) glimmer of hope at the end. However, before we get to the end, we learn of the desert of love in the life of Paul, a doctor, and his son Raymond. Paul is unhappy in his marriage (through no fault of his wife) and does not get on with his son, daughter and son-in-law, though does make an occasional effort to do so. He has fallen in love with Maria Cross, a widow whose young son has recently died. At the beginning of the book, we learn that Raymond, in his mid-thirties, had met this woman seventeen years previously and that she had done something to him that caused him great bitterness. He now sees her again, thinking about revenge. The novel is, to a great extent, about what happened.