Viper in the Fist
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Viper in the Fist (French Vipère au Poing) is a novel by Hervé Bazin.
It is the first and best known of a trilogy, the rest being La Mort du Petit Cheval and Le Cri de la Chouette. These three novels are largely autobiographical.
When published in 1948, Vipère au Poing was an immense success and also the cause of a considerable scandal. It is nowadays considered a classical novel in France, often given to schoolchildren to read.
Social criticism
Viper in the Fist, however short, is a vitriolic indictment of early 20th century French rural bourgeois society. Bazin depicts a family where hypocrisy is rampant and where observance of Catholic rituals is far more important than virtues like love or compassion. While most characters of common people seem good-hearted, characters of the bourgeoisie and the ecclesiastical world are generally despicable. The various priests that appear as educators collaborate with the narrator's mother's cruel follies; some have other weaknesses, such as fornication with young women.
The universe that Bazin depicts — rural bourgeois rentiers — is slowly dying, but they don't seem to recognize it. They consider themselves the salt of the earth, who replaced the former nobility, who failed in keeping France on its good way. Like the nobility, they despise commerce, yet live mostly ruined. They support the monarchist Action Française — or ceased to support it because the Pope requested it, not because they themselves judged that it was repugnant.
Bazin's hatred for this social milieu is palpable.
Plot
1922 The story begins by the recollection of young Jean Rézeau catching a viper in his grandparents' courtyard and holding it in his fist. He chokes it to death.
Young Jean lives with his grandparents. When his grandmother dies, his parents come back from China where his father teaches Law. He and his brothers then discover than their mother Paule is a horrible woman, who hates her life and her children. She is extremely severe with them and deliberately unfair to the point of cruelty. Their father is a weak man who, except in rare occasions, submits to his wife's will, and spends his time in entomology studies.
Gradually, this turns to a perverse domestic war. Paule seizes any pretext for being cruel to her sons, and especially to Jean. Jean and his brother attempt to kill their mother twice: once with an overdose of medicine (which only gave her diarrhea), once by attempting to drown her in the river, making it seem an accident. She escapes.
On one occasion, she asks their sons' personal educator to flog Jean as a punishment. Jean escapes and goes see his grandfather, a senator living in an upscale area of Paris. He is brought back by his father, who is fairly embarrassed by the situation.
Jean is now 15. He discovers sex with Madeleine, a young farmer's daughter from the area. He does not love her, for he distrusts all women, into whom he sees his own mother. He claims that women are little but an exutory for semen.
Paule tries to have her son caught red-handed with theft by intentionally leaving her wallet in Jean's bedroom. Jean foils her plot. After a short confrontation, he obtains what he wants, and what Paule wants too: the departure of Jean and his brother to a boarding school.
Jean concludes his memoirs by saying that he may have won, apparently, but in reality Paule won: she has destroyed his whole being. Throughout his life, he'll not be able to feel trust or love. He's the one that walks with a viper in his fist.