Émile Zola (1840–1902)

Did I just read a Zola novel with a happy ending?? I think I did, but I'm not completely sure.

[The Ladies' Paradise] continues the story of Gustave Mouret, who has opened a large department store in Paris. Women discover that they love to shop and buy (and steal) merchandise that they never knew they needed or wanted. And all of the small businesses in Paris begin to go out of business. Denise is a young woman in need of a job to support her brothers. She begins working at the Ladies' Paradise. She is small, thin, and plain but her wholesome nature and quiet ways eventually draw Mouret's attention. Her high moral standards make him even more obsessed with her.

This book is an ode to consumerism, with long passages describing the sales techniques that draw women in and descriptions of the merchandise. I always love reading Zola's descriptive passages and find his insights into human nature spot on. This novel, though, was a little less impactful to me. I think partially the characters, but mainly the plot, was just less interesting.

I think all of Zola's novels are worth reading, but I wouldn't recommend starting with this one.… (more)

"If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villages that clung to it like nests of vermin, the human insects that lived off its flesh, were enough to dishonour it and blight any contact with it."

Wandering, impoverished veteran Jean Macquart finds himself in a farming village in Northern France in the early 1860s where he becomes an outsider presence in a drunken, bitter, self-serving community. Spanning a decade, Zola's novel of peasant life, published in the late 1880s, caused him plenty of bad press both in France and England. True, he contracts all the bad things which can occur in rural communities, trapped in cycles of violence and greed, and seems to imply that this town represents everyone. But then again, one could say he did this for the aristocrats of The Kill or the urban bourgeoisie in Pot Luck or the comfortable town lives of those in The Conquest of Plassans. Still, his aggressive characters caused especial outrage this time around, and Earth was the novel which saw his early translations in England cast aside and replaced - after a lengthy obscenity trial - with horribly bowdlerised Victorian niceties that effectively ruined his English-language reputation for half a century or more.

Where The Belly of Paris rippled with the tastes and smells of food, and The Masterpiece gave off the whiff of paint and canvas, here, Zola takes his cue from the earth itself. The soil, the manure, the blood and sweat and semen. (I will never forget, as a child in my first agriculture class at school, seeing a bull castrated before my eyes.) There's Hyacinthe, better known because of his appearance as Jesus Christ, who is best known for his incredible ability at musical farting. There's Old Mother Poo (or Mother Caca in another translation I've seen) who sells her bounteous produce at market but only to those who don't mind the fact that she uses her own excrement as fertiliser due to her poverty. And there's the opening sequence, which was enough to ruffle the feathers of the well-to-do, in which teenage Francoise throws her hand in to assist a bull who is to short to reach the vagina of the cow he is trying to impregnate.

The always excellent Brian Nelson's Oxford introduction makes mention of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "grotesque realism", a carnival-esque approach first applied to the work of Rabelais, and Nelson is right; the atmosphere of this lengthy novel is more garish, more outsized than many of the works in the series thus far. One of my favourite scenes must be that of Gideon the drunk donkey! And there is much fun and horror to be had in the musical chairs with which an old man is shuffled between his relatives, none of them interested in caring for him but all of them with one eye on the potential inheritance.

By the end of the 1880s, Zola was perhaps France's most famous author, and he no longer felt the need (if he ever had) to coddle his readers. There are scenes here where the author himself makes his presence known in a more forceful, didactic way than we are used to. He still often enjoys unforgettable symbolism (Lise going into labour at the same time as her beloved cow gives birth, the onlookers rushing between the two). His skill at limited third-person perspective has never been better, as he cuts between the viewpoints of the entangled feuds active in the village. But he is also prone to poorly disguising his own moralising in the reported thoughts of Jean Macquart himself. Unusually for this series, it is not really Jean's story, although he is drawn into things late in the piece. Dare I say Zola wanted to write this novel regardless of whether it really fit into his schema?

There are occasional moments here that will give a 21st century reader pause. A revelation near the very end of the novel which a character has just before they are brutally attacked may seem unfair on the part of the reader - or, if psychologically plausible, not built up enough by the author before it comes. Still, this is a richly observed piece of literature. The sumptuous descriptions of the landscape and country life feel so thoroughly freeing. Whether a coal mine, laundrette, food market, parliament, suburban home, or department store, almost every novel in the series thus far has taken place in a deliberately limited sphere. And while we remain in a limited space here too, it's one with vistas and fields as far as the eye can see. An expanse of earth that offers promise or mockery, depending on the eye of the beholder.

For several novels now, the notion of "the Empire" which dominated the early part of the series, has lain dormant, warranting few mentions, if any. Here, though, as the plot skips ahead in bursts from 1860 to 1870, the approaching war clouds grow thicker and clearer. The end may not be here yet - for either the Second Empire or the Rougon-Macquart series - but, if one closes one's eyes and listens carefully, one can hear the thunder.… (more)

"When you're young you think that you're going to be happy later on, there are things you look forward to; and then you keep finding you're as hard up as ever, you stay bogged down in poverty... I don't blame anyone for it, but there are times when I feel sick at the injustice of it all."

In the thirteenth novel of Zola's staggering Rougon-Macquart cycle, we are reunited with Étienne Lantier, brother of Nana and son of Gervaise, the pathetic heroine of L'Assommoir (neither of which is required reading here, although the latter is my favourite of the cycle thus far). Étienne, impoverished and unemployed, finds himself at the coal mines of Le Voreux, where he attempts to radicalise the miners and their families into a strike to protect their working conditions.

By now, Zola was at the peak of his powers. Buoyed by a fear that he would reach death or senility before the planned end of his great series of novels, the author found himself writing with a renewed vigour. While he has previously explored the lives of the working classes in L'Assommoir, this was to be a novel about active resistance, as opposed to the "passive" poverty of the former. Although Étienne has dreams for a great socialist state, most of the miners are fighting not for revolution but to hang on to their existing (barbarous) conditions in the face of new restrictions imposed by management. Living in the factory town - with the cookie-cutter name of Village Two Hundred and Forty - entire generations trudge each morning to the mines, children being enrolled as soon as they are able, with the oldies transitioning to above-ground work once the back-breaking labour becomes too much. Their life is one of 'knowing their place', like the heartbreaking - and richly symbolic - horses, Bataille and Trompette, who have served their entire adult lives hundreds of metres below ground, clinging to some atavistic memory of sunlight. And always in the background, the mine of Le Voreux "crouching like a vicious beast of prey, snorting louder and longer, as if choking on its painful digestion of human flesh".

I read the final chapters of the novel during the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic, which was an interesting parallel to stories of families scraping to get by, pantries exhausted of resources as the strike drags on, vacillating between the two great human urges of kindness to others and self-preservation. Zola chooses a different narrative tone for each of his novels, and here his narrator is scrupulously fair. This is not the same voice that moralised on Nana or gossiped about the sex lives of the characters in Pot-Luck. This is Zola the social anatomist, asking the reader to decide from the evidence alone whether the current system is a fair one. The ownership class are either cautiously sympathetic, too removed to be aware of the reality of the situation, or pitying... but appreciative of the hierarchical nature of society ("Doubtless they were brutes", says one such with compassion, "but they were illiterate starving brutes"). The peasant mob is too easily spurred on by their hunger and oppression to commit acts of grotesque violence (the single most stomach-churning scene in the series thus far occurs, but I'm not going to repeat it here). And the extreme radicals whom Étienne admires are - like the advocates of social reform in any modern era - all too easily caricatured by the media and the bourgeois to appear as ungrateful or even spiteful.

In short, there is no way to win. Accepting the status quo is an implicit death-knell for oneself and one's children and grandchildren. Politely asking for more is a humiliating and fruitless task. Pushing for it, demanding it, taking it by force is considered the act of brutes - and indeed, often is barbaric in its execution. (Zola's refusal to sugar-coat the lives and intentions of the poor, just as the rich, is especially remarkable - contrast with his contemporary, Charles Dickens.) Germinal is not without hope, but it is a distant hope, a plea for an awakening. This is a novel of ideas, at heart, although Zola's delight in crowd scenes, dissection of character, and "spirit of place" remain on show. Most of his novels have at least one great set-piece, and here it is the final 100 pages, in which a great catastrophe is recounted in excruciating detail. (As always, the author had spent some brief time at an actual coal mine to understand the intricacies of the field.)

There is an additional note for modern readers, which we should keep in mind. Although set in the mid-1860s (the peak of Second Empire France), this was being written in 1884, the year in which trade unions were finally legalised in what was now the Republic of France. Zola was reflecting on the importance of a movement, although many of the outrageous practices chronicled herein still continued, in France as in other countries. And I would be remiss not to mention a translation: go for a modern one. I read Peter Collier's, as I am devoted to the Oxford series, but what's important is to avoid anything older than the 1970s. You will be inevitably faced with cuts, extreme censorship, or just archaic prose. Avoid it!

Subjectively, Germinal easily sits within my Top Five of Zola's series but from an objective standpoint, it is perhaps the most important.… (more)