My Favorites (foreign novels)

Ever since I was young, I've loved deciding on my top three favorites.
I love the process of agonizing over them, trying hard to resist the urge to expand it to a top five because they just won't fit into a top three.

Three favorite novels (foreign edition)

*I can't summarize the stories, so these are impressions that will only make sense to those who have read them.

"Absent in the Spring"
It's a novel Agatha Christie wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. I feel like, what's with the title 'Absent in the Spring'?, and this is the cover...

If you look closely, you can see a woman standing at a distance where she could be embraced behind the person in white, but for the longest time, I thought the woman in white was raising her left arm and showing off her armpit for all it was worth. I kept wondering, why such a cover?
Well, anyway,
The original title is The Rose and the Yew Tree.
The Rose represents beauty, love, passion, social success, the brilliance of life, being in the spotlight, perhaps?
As for the Yew, I didn't really know, so I looked it up on Wiki and it said, 'The legendary Robin Hood was buried at the foot of a yew tree,' and it seems to be a symbol of trees planted in graveyards.
In other words, by contrast, does it represent death, patience, silence, or something like that?

The characters in Absent in the Spring can be divided into the Rose side and the Yew side, but Teresa alone seems to bloom steadily and single-mindedly in the place where she is planted, without being shaken, yet not having given up on the world either. She doesn't seem to fit into either category, and I find her to be a very fascinating character.

Even though I'm only choosing three works, two of the three are by the same author...

It's "Absent in the Spring."
Most people might feel a sense of unease toward the protagonist, a housewife, but I feel unease toward the environment surrounding her. I think the most sinful person is the protagonist's husband. In the end, wasn't it this husband who couldn't be 'absent in the spring'?
Even if she wasn't saved, it wouldn't have mattered if she had ended her life that way, but to have the fact that she wasn't saved brought to light by the people around her, to have it forcibly dug up... isn't that too cruel? If she were falling into a pit of loneliness on her own, that would be one thing, but I feel like she's a victim.
I don't intend to romanticize the protagonist. But that said, perhaps if there were some trigger, I might actually be an unsaved housewife myself. And even though I lived without realizing it, I might suddenly realize it at some point and find myself standing on the edge of loneliness. Because I have that kind of vulnerability, I might end up sympathizing with the protagonist a little.
I want to be a good mother. I want to be a good wife. I want to be sociable, calm, and lively. But if I feel a tear somewhere, a future like this protagonist's might be waiting for me. That thought is scary.
That was the kind of novel it was.

"The Scarlet Letter"
By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Even if they commit the same sin, they survive in completely different ways, and their ways of being saved are also different.
Three people appear: Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Hester, but for Hester alone, the presence of her daughter Pearl nearby is what makes her situation decisively different from the other two. One wants to think about whether the existence of the result of life itself is a shackle or a salvation, but in the end, I felt that there is no one in a position to decide that.

The problems of sin, punishment, and judgment have no answers, yet I think about them forever. Ah, it's exhausting.

By the way, the setting of The Scarlet Letter is a Puritan society, but
In the 2024 horror movie "MaXXXine," the title of the fictional horror movie that the protagonist Maxine aims for is "Puritan II," and this movie itself is a work that follows "X" and "Pearl."
It's Puritan and it's Pearl. I wonder if I can analyze this by linking it to The Scarlet Letter?
For now, the problems of sin, punishment, and judgment are exhausting, so maybe I'll think about this instead?