Op een ochtend in januari 1539 werd in het dorp Artigues een bruiloft gevierd.

I've wanted to read this book since I saw the movie decades ago, so I immediately checked it out when it showed up on my library feed.

Based on an 1874 legal history, this short novel describes the events leading to a legal dispute in 1539. Martin Guerre is married to Bertrand, and after an argument with his father, with whom he owns and manages a prosperous farm, he takes off for a break. Bertrand expects him to be gone a few months at the most. Instead, he is gone eight years. When he returns, everyone accepts him as Martin Guerre, but after a while Bertrand begins to suspect otherwise--he is too "nice" to be Martin. Bertrand begins legal proceedings to have him declared an imposter.

The focus of the book was on Bertrand's state of mind. It did a good job of putting the reader into a 16th century mindset, and the characters were well-developed. Although it might seem fantastical that a woman might not recognize her husband, the story was plausible and well-told.

Recommended.

3 stars ( )

I read this novel years ago for school, but I was clicking around Goodreads randomly and I realised that, for some bizarre reason, this book has a lot of positive reviews, so I thought I'd try to counterbalance that a little.

This book made me really angry. For a start, it's just so boring -- you'd think it'd be easy to avoid putting too much padding in a 109-page novella, but no, this book will do such things as devote an entire page to describing a tree, and honestly, I do not care about trees that much. So. That happens.

But worse, I despised the plot. Basically what happens is this: a woman in sixteenth-century France marries this man, Martin Guerre, who is abusive and generally a despicable person. At some point he up and leaves her, which would seem to me to be the highlight of their entire marriage, except for the part where this leaves her in a precarious position in sixteenth-century France. Eight years later, Martin Guerre finally deigns to return, only now he's much kinder and warmer, a really nice guy, someone it wouldn't be hell on earth to live with. This means Bertrande (the woman) becomes convinced that he's not really Martin Guerre at all, but an impostor. Most of the rest of the book is then about her struggle to make everyone else realise he's an impostor, even though he's clearly a vast improvement on the man she was married to before, so I personally would be very inclined to bury my doubts.

Then at the end he's proved to be an impostor because the real Martin Guerre actually returns, and promptly abuses Bertrande anew to thank her for making the impostor's life as hard as possible in spite of what a great guy he was. Oh sorry, I mean for "cheating" on him. Because he was definitely entitled to her loyalty after being abusive and abandoning her, after all.

I mean, I do hate novels where characters seem anachronistic, and my teacher at the time gave me a lecture about how I just didn't understand how deep the fear of hell ran in Bertrande's time. But quite honestly, I think this depth of fear of hell would have been equally unusual in Bertrande's time as ours. In the last millennium, Europe has been full of people who had affairs or even, god forbid, sex before marriage - and this is a guy who could quite easily have been Bertrande's true husband, just a bit more mature and with an actual conscience. So fine, Bertrande is part of that small minority of people who actually think remaining loyal to an abusive husband is better than the possibility of eternal damnation. This is not really a segment of society I care to read about. Each to their own, though. ( )

Janet Lewis' short novel The Wife of Martin Guerre examines this classic case of circumstantial evidence, telling the story mainly through the perspective of Guerre's wife, Bertrande de Rols. A readable and lyrical adaptation of the tale, with all its twists, turns, and surprises. Lewis delves deeply into Bertrande's frame of mind as she ultimately concludes that she must confront the man purporting to be her husband, and the powerful ending really speaks to the all-important question of truth versus justice.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-review-wife-of-martin-guerre.html ( )