Vipers’ Tangle

Le Noeud de vipères (1932; Vipers’ Tangle) is often considered Mauriac’s masterpiece. It is a marital drama, depicting an old lawyer’s rancour toward his family, his passion for money, and his final conversion. In this, as in other Mauriac novels, the love that his characters seek vainly in human contacts…

…and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing…