Nana

Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which I undertook to read in publication order some years ago. In some ways, my appreciation for this novel has grown in direct proportion to my increasing dislike for most, if not all the characters in the story, though oddly enough there seems to be no direct correlation between the two factors. Nana is the daughter of Gervaise Macquart, the doomed alcoholic heroine of L'Assommoir, book 9 in the series. Towards the end of that book, the young girl is already taking a bad turn, and by the age of sixteen has taken to walking the streets and finding older men to finance her taste for luxury. This novel, wholly dedicated to her story, is constructed like a play, show more with each of the 14 chapters showing a different act in the story of the rise, then fall, then the higher rise, then the complete destruction of a woman who is best described as a 'Golden Fly' ('La Mouche d'Or') by a journalist writing about her in the (fictional) newspapers of the day. A golden fly originating from five generations of bad heredity, who, because of her ample shapes, her golden tresses and boundless appetite for sex and luxury, manages to corrupt all the individuals of the upper classes which she happens to land on.

The first chapter introduces Nana to the reader and the Parisian public as a the new sensation of the variety theatre in a play called La Blonde Vénus, which is designed to show off her ample physical attractions, displaying her virtually in all her nude glory to a rapt audience. This, her first great success, introduces her to men of the upper classes, counts and viscounts and marquesses alike, none of which can resist her charms; even the Prince of Whales is a fan. When Count Muffat, who has always been a devout and proper Catholic falls madly in love with her, she is in a position to dictate all her conditions. Consequently, she is installed in her own luxurious private hotel in one of the best neighbourhoods of Paris, and though she has promised Muffat she will be faithful to him in return for an unending stream of generous gifts, her boredom pushes her to greater and greater infidelities.

Men's fortunes and honour are lost to her, some even lose their life in their pursuit of her, but she is like a stupid, fat and beautiful child who has no respect or interest in anything but her own pleasure, grabbing at everything and turning it all to dust with her clumsy carelessness, taking pleasure in the very havoc and destruction she wreaks. Nana is not a woman a reader can love or admire, save for the fact that she is guileless and that Zola uses her a a weapon against the corrupt Second French Empire. As a means to that end, she has great entertainment value as The Goddess of Destruction and I have not resisted her charms, having read and re-read this novel three times so far from my teenage years onward, having every intention to revisit it again and again still now. Zola has always been a painter of vast and sumptuous tableaux with his words (though I cannot say whether he translates into English all that well, as I've had the privilege of always reading him in the original French), and here he paints scintillating pictures of apparently limitless wealth and unrestrained, utterly corrupt luxury. For those not familiar with Zola's work, this novel stands alone perfectly well, and it is probably his most decadent and somehow still relevant today. show less

Scanning through the covers for this, which must be the most famous of Zola's novels, it was no surprise to find reproductions of just about all the well-known French paintings of sexually-alluring females there are. Publishers like to go with what they know when it comes to getting people to buy their books. But I think they're missing a trick: what this book needs on its cover is something along the lines of William Powell Frith's Derby Day. Zola's motto was always "nothing exceeds like excess", and that was never more applicable than in Nana, where he really pulls all the stops out to give us Second Empire Paris at its wildest and most decadent: the scale and hyperactivity of the Longchamps chapter alone is enough almost to make show more Frith look like a painter of still life. (Delacroix is probably the only other famous painter who comes anywhere near Zola's intensity, but he can't compete on complexity...)

But that isn't to say that Zola is simply letting himself go for the sake of it: the big scenes here are harnessed to do a carefully controlled job. Sometimes perhaps in a slightly too forced way, like the famous opening sequence where we are kept hanging around in the front-of-house part of the theatre for an impossibly long time as the audience take their seats and Zola builds up our expectations and introduces us to what seems like a ridiculously large number of minor characters before we get our first glimpse of the new star. Or the early chapter describing a stiff formal reception at the Muffats', where the guests' talk about Bismarck seems entirely irrelevant to the story - until Zola picks it up again and bounces it back at us in a dramatically different context at the very end of the book.

L'Assommoir charted the tragic failure of Gervaise's attempt to claw her family to a safe place in society by prudence, self-sacrifice and hard work; in Nana, Gervaise's daughter, who is prepared to do just about anything except work to get what she wants, takes a dramatic (but apparently unconscious) revenge on the world that crushed her parents. Using her uncontrollable sexual attraction and her almost unlimited capacity to consume luxuries and cash, Nana brings a succession of aristocrats, financiers, journalists, racehorse owners and theatre producers crashing down into ruin, dishonours two noble families, and eventually sends out a (symbolic) wave of pollution that seems to be the force bringing the whole corrupt Empire crashing down into the senseless war that destroys it.

Zola takes us through just about every aspect of the sex-industry of the time, from street-walkers and underground lesbian clubs at one end of the scale right through to the actresses and "official" mistresses at the top end of the profession - during her stage period, Nana is shown welcoming the portly "Prince d'Ecosse" (can't imagine whom Zola was trying to conceal under that name...) into her dressing room; as a courtesan her clients include dukes and marquesses. In the process, there's plenty of titillation - Nana takes her clothes off more often than the average Bond girl - but there's also plenty of opportunity for the reader to reflect on the damage and waste involved in a hypocritical system in which upper-class men are expected to find sexual pleasure outside the family sphere, but are unable to accept the idea that their wives might want to do something similar. Nothing new there, of course: French literature has been having fun with that idea since at least the middle of the 18th century, but Zola increases the stakes by hammering home time after time that what this is all about is not some sort of vaguely illicit romantic glamour: it is sex, sex, sex. Dirty, messy, chaotic and uncontrollable, driven only by money and pleasure. Heady stuff for 1880, and still pretty hard-hitting today. show less

When Nana was first published in 1880, the French reading public was already familiar with her as the daughter of the doomed Gervaise Macquart in L'Assommoir. A wayward precocious street urchin in that book, it would come as no surprise to Zola's readers to now find her on the stage, eager to take on all Paris and more. This was 1867, the year of the World's Fair, and the world had come to Paris to take it all in.

Despite such a setting, there is a contemporary feel to the novel. Nana had a master promoter in Bordenave, the manager of the theatre where she first came to the attention of the public. Zola describes her first performance, initially having fun with the audience, cajoling them along, but not making a great impression. show more However, by the end of the evening, her name would be on everyone's lips. In a silly operetta, Zola's dig at Offenbach, she appeared later in the third act

...naked, naked and unashamed, serenely confident in the irresistible power of young flesh... Covered by a simple veil, her whole body could be seen, or imagined, by all through the diaphanous, white, frothy gauze. It was Venus being born out of the waves, hidden only by her hair.... Now there was no clapping, and no one thought of laughing. The men had a strained, earnest look on their faces; their nostrils were taut, their mouths parched and burning. It was as if the softest of breezes had passed through, full of secret menace. This good-natured girl had suddenly become a disturbing woman offering frenzied sexuality and the arcane delights of lust. Nana was still smiling, but it was the mocking smile of a man-eater.

Nana had arrived.

She was seen with a variety of men. They lined up at her door. She took a serious lover and threw that chance away for a ne'er do well, only to stage a comeback worthy of an twenty-first century star.

Zola had tried unsuccessfully to write for the stage, and he knew that world. He also did his usual meticulous research. Contemporary readers of his would have recognized certain real life actresses and scandals. Nana's lovers encompassed a broad range of society from mistress to the court chamberlain of the Empress to an enduring lesbian relationship. It's no wonder critics and censors went wild. The first edition of 55,000 copies sold out in one day. No less an authority than Flaubert said that [Nana] "...tends toward myth but never ceases to be real".* It is Zola's skill that makes Nana such a credible character.

The last chapter of the book, the famous Chapter 14 ("Unsurpassable", "Incomparable" Flaubert again), is Zola's comment on life, the Second Empire, and corruption of all kinds. Nana easily stands with Anna Karenina and Dorothea Brooke as one of the great fictional characters of the nineteenth century.

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*Quoted by [[Douglas Parmée]] in his introduction pxxiii show less

[Nana] is Zola's exploration of the world of prostitution and decadence. Nana is a young girl when the book opens, making her debut in the theater. There is tons of buzz about her - everyone knows she'll be a flop in terms of acting and singing, but nevertheless she is a sensation. Why? Because she's beautiful and sensual. Men go mad for her.

Nana is the little girl that we meet in [L'Assomoir], daughter to a drunken father and growing up in poverty, who ends up on the streets as a common prostitute. She is "discovered" by the upper class and ends up attracting and destroying the lives and fortunes of every wealthy man in her circle. They cannot resist her and Zola doesn't mince words describing why. He details their sex lives and her show more attractions and willingness with surprising candor and detail for a 19th century novel.

The writing here is fantastic. The opening party scenes are fabulous and struck me as having influenced [[Proust]]'s famous drawing room scenes. And the detail about Nana and her escapades and the gruesome endings are unforgettable. I will say, though, that I didn't think this was up to the level of [Germinal] or [L'Assomoir], the other two Zola books I've read. I think it was the topic - it just didn't have the gravitas of those other works. And I got a little tired of reading about these wealthy men who just let Nana run all over them and waste away their fortunes, health, and happiness. show less

Nana by Emile Zola was written 1880 and vividly captures the lively theatre society of Paris and the life of courtesan Nana Coupeau. Nana has risen to a high class prostitute through her role as the blonde Venus in a popular operetta. Although she has no acting or singing talent, her blatant sex appeal causes Paris to be taken with her and by the end of the play, when she appears on stage virtually naked she becomes a star.

Men flock to be around her, they yearn to possess her but Nana is a shrewd woman and is looking after her own affairs. Although she can be cold and manipulative, she is the product of an abusive childhood and the one thing she appears to be searching for is control. She becomes a destructive force in the lives of the show more men who are drawn to her. The very definition of a man-eater, her admirers find themselves bankrupt, imprisoned or deeply humiliated. As for Nana, no amount of money appears to satisfy her. Then comes the day that Nana disappears, rumors spring up about where she is and who she could possibly be with. The truth of the matter is much more tragic.

Critics far more clever than I have written about the meaning of this literary work. Personally I felt that the author was shining a light on a small corner of society. This brittle section of life that is bored, wasteful and decadent. The excesses and moral corruption of this society breeds misogyny in the men and greed and heartlessness in the women that they preyed upon. Distasteful as I found this story, the author’s strong power of observation certainly brought it to life and drew me into this symbolic tale. show less

A turgid nightmare of style over substance.

"You know, that lot up there doesn't impress me anymore... You ought to see them when they take their wrappings off... Filth at the top, filth down below, there's nothing but filth and more filth..."

Regular readers of my reviews know I'm a diabolical fan of Émile Zola, and especially his 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series, of which Nana is the ninth. While the first eight are all - to my mind - wonderful works of fiction, this is an example of a book justly famous in its time, but unjustly classified as a highlight of 19th century French lit by modern readers.

Nana is, not importantly, a kind of sequel to L'Assommoir. Set in 1867-70, the final years of France's Second Empire, Zola centres his show more novel on Anna 'Nana' Coupeau, daughter of the impoverished laundress from that previous volume. Having run away from home in her teens, Nana becomes a famous stage actress - despite an arguable level of talent - and then aims for the stars. More specifically, she wants money and comfort. And this means taking, grabbing, pilfering from anyone she can find. She's a disastrous user of her fellow man, a scourge on polite society, as selfish as they come. (Her poor prepubescent son, Louis, described by those who meet him as sad and old before his time, never gets a chance to live with her, and is an accessory at best.)

Nana caused Zola a bit of trouble as a character. When he began planning the series, the Second Empire had not yet fallen; he assumed it would take another 5-10 years. His plan was to let Nana's life rise and fall over a decade. Instead, the Empire crumbled before he had even published the first volume! As a result, not only has Nana aged a few years mysteriously since L'Assommoir but her entire dramatic life takes place over barely three years.

The novel, like all of the Rougon-Macquart volumes, stands in lovely contrast to those around it. Where Clorinde in La Curée lusted for power; Helene in Une Page d'amour for peace and requited love; Lisa in The Belly of Paris for lawful society and a roof over her family's head; Nana is thoroughly selfish, but seeks not so much power as luxury. Where Une Page d'amour exulted in the quiet hideaway of the Grandjean home, Nana is a novel about people. Every chapter reverberates with characters - sometimes dozens! - inhabiting tight rooms and carefully-drawn spaces: among them, a day at the races, an absurd dinner party, extravagant scenes at the theatre - both in the stalls and, later, backstage, and a country picnic that sets hearts aflame. Most tellingly, where Zola used the narrative voice of the gossip in L'Assommoir or that of the close internal monologue in The Sin of Abbe Mouret, here there's no doubting that it's Monsieur Zola himself telling this tale. But more on that below.

"A duel over Nana? The whole of Paris would laugh at you, my dear count. Nobody fights over Nana, the idea's ridiculous."

Nana scrambles around Paris, working her way from sidewalk to street door to overpriced apartment to mansion and back again. Through secret lovers, less secret lovers, and even less secret lovers, her mad rise is chronicled through a series of social engagements and intimate moments where she's ever the charmer - until she's got exactly what she wants from you. And then... watch out.

By 1880, Zola was at last the most famous novelist in Paris. (Flaubert had just died, and Hugo wouldn't be far behind.) L'Assommoir had caused a literary scandal, and all of the previous novels had been reprinted to become bestsellers. So a shocking story about a woman who becomes the city's most famous tart (Zola's word!), told in often explicit detail, and with sledgehammer symbolism comparing her to the dying days of the Empire, was bound to excite the literati of the Third Republic. And perhaps this was part of the problem.

So, what are the problems, 140 years after publication? For starters, as I said above, style after substance. True, Zola is always prone to this - even as a card-carrying acolyte, I can't deny the languid nature of some of his literary flights of fancy in The Sin of Abbe Mouret or The Belly of Paris. And his dedication to naturalism (at the time, the most challenging school of literature - before modernism arose from the embers of WWI) inevitably means we have to shift from a 21st century view to his. Fair enough. But the novel is tough, like overcooked meat, for, dare I say it, at least the first 8 of its 14 chapters. When Nana hosts 32 characters for dinner, the mind boggles at how Zola can keep them all apart, but the reader also struggles to take away anything more than a broad painting of chaos. (The author wins historical points though, not intentionally, for his well-researched prose. As an actor, the theatre sequences appeal to me especially, detailing as they do the backstage procedures and audience attitudes of 1860s France.) Zola is deliberately creating an ever-spinning world around Nana, a world that is all performance, all show, all signalling and social gain. Yes. One website lists 117 characters who appear in Nana alone, the most out of any book in the series! Frankly, though, many of these large group scenes become turgid. And although the last few chapters somewhat redeem this by bringing everyone back for powerful symbolic closures, there are still just too many. (I say this as someone who foams at the mouth with delight when soap operas bring back Tertiary Character #751, so if I'm saying it, something is seriously wrong!)

Some of the problems with the novel, though, are more accidents of history. Of the first 9 books in the series, I believe Nana is the most "immediate", by which I mean responding to contemporary tastes - and these kind of things always date quicker than others. (Ironic, given that some of his early novels such as The Fortune of the Rougons are sometimes written off as being merely "historical novels".) To be honest, this isn't helped by the Oxford edition translated by Douglas Parmée, which isn't up to the standard of the other Oxford translations. His footnotes especially seem arbitrary and not always as helpful as they could be. (This stems in part from the fact that Nana was translated in the early 1990s, before Oxford decided to release the whole series, and thus avoids linking the book to Zola's broader canon, as the more recent releases do.) This particularly comes out in the religious undertones. Count Muffat's relationship with his mysterious priest-cum-advisor is never really clarified - it would have been obvious to a contemporary audience, one assumes - and so his late personality change seems rather unprepared-for.

There's still plenty of vintage Zola in Nana. (I'm being deliberately harsh with my 2 star review as a rebuke to my critics.) The delectable social confrontations. The deeply messed-up relationship between Nana and Muffat. The author's penchant for noting the little moments that make up our lives, such as the young couple cavorting gaily in the room next to where a tragic moment occurs. The tertiary characters who delight in their one appearance. (The theatre dresser, Madame Jules, "was ageless with a parchment-like skin and the stony features of old maids who've never been young. She had dried up in the sweltering heat of theatre dressing-rooms, surrounded by the most celebrated breasts and thighs Paris had to offer. She wore an everlasting faded black dress, and on her sexless, flat bosom, in the place of her heart, a thicket of pins.") Zola also takes advantage of the fact that the novel was serialised to throw in some early meta-textual references, when Nana voices her own opinions on novels about tarts, and is herself satirised in newspapers, much as the character was in real life!

Most frustrating of all, however, is Zola's structure. I find it utterly perplexing. After 12 chapters of often scattered social drama, Zola gives us an utterly bewildering final 2 chapters that have some gorgeous symbolism but, rather unexpectedly, pack an entire year into 50 pages. Nana encounters about seven different lifestyle changes, every other character faces either ruin or ascent, and major confrontations between characters take place in half a paragraph. It rather feels like Chapter 13 could have been the entire novel, and contains much of the core drama in evaporated form! Having spent so much time building up his world, Zola lets entire swathes of the plot take place essentially offstage. If they'd had phones in 1868, I would have said Zola was phoning it in.

Now perhaps this is all fair enough. Nana is not a psychological drama along the lines of The Conquest of Plassans. I should try not to hold it to those standards. The book is a tale of boulevard society, an indictment of an era. But it frustrates me rather than entertains, and I don't think I can quite forgive it. (My pen is running hot because my mind expected much more.) Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that it's not even Zola's fault I don't like the novel. He did what I respect: created a tone of voice, and a narrative structure, to suit his lead character and his book's purpose. It's just one that doesn't resonate into the 21st century like so many of the others in the series do.

Finally, then, there's the symbolism, dripping like melting lard. Late in the novel, the narrative voice begins to moralise. "Nana was turning this whole society putrid to the rhythm of her vulgar tune". Rather like movie Scarlett O'Hara (book Scarlett seems to actually be a heroine), Zola makes it clear that her presence symbolises the dark, greedy ways of an entire class. And, what's worse, we know that it's not even her class to begin with! Nana as interloper is villainess enough; Nana choosing to interlope into the gaudy lower aristocracy is even worse. At first, I was repulsed by the author's own repulsion. It seemed needlessly didactic and more than a little sexist. (Zola biographers have examined his rather complex relationship to sex and lust.) But, as 1869 gives way to 1870, it becomes clear that Nana is the ultimate symbol - thus far into the series, anyhow - of Zola's real target: the amoral, mercilessly capitalist Second Empire. Say what one will about the novel, but the final chapter is a gem. Again, though, as the author contrasts darkly comic social customs, the surprising fate of his main character, and the Emperor's fateful decision to go to war against the Prussians, one feels that more footnotes could have been provided than Mr. Parmée apparently felt necessary.

All in all, you need to read this if you're doing the Rougon-Macquart If you're not, ignore the hype. It's an unfortunate combination of literary experts promoting the book because they understand it, casual readers assuming it's good because they don't fully understand it, and the lack - until the last couple of decades - of good translations of many of Zola's better novels. Ironically, given the subject of the book, sometimes fame is all it takes.

"On to Berlin! On to Berlin! On to Berlin!" show less

This magnificent novel is the story of the rise, fall, and rise again of Nana (child of Gervais of L'Assommoir) from streetwalker to queen of Parisian society in the late 1860's.

It opens with Nana's stage debut in a risque theatrical production. Many of Paris's high society womanizers and rogues are there, as well as many of Paris's reigning courtesans. All are breathlessly awaiting their first experience of Nana; however, when she eventually appears they are at first underwhelmed. Then:

"looking as though she herself were saying with a wink of her eye that she didn't possess a ha'porth of talent, but it didn't matter, she had something better than that,"

Nana wows them all. I pictured Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. show more President.

Thereafter, we follow Nana as she acquires and ruins men of all social status and rank. She has "an ever keen appetite for squandering money, a natural disdain for the man who paid, a perpetual caprice for devouring, a pride in the ruin of her lovers." We see Nana at the theater, entertaining at orgy-like dinners, at her country estate, at the races. Through her we see the decadence and corruption of French society of this era.

Zola has skillfully created a well-rounded character in Nana, not just a cardboard symbol of immorality. Despite her penchant for destroying men, we are still sympathetic to her. Although she can be vain and selfish, she is also generous, sometimes to a fault, and she is accepting of others. Although she is calculating and cunning, she is also innocent and naive in many ways. Perhaps these are the things that make her so irresistible.

For the most part Zola stays away from moralizing. He rarely interjects himself into the novel, and lets us be a fly on the wall observing Nana's life. Not surprisingly, the novel was widely condemned when it was initially published, for example:

"Much ability is displayed in this offensive work of engineering skill, and people are asked to pardon the foul sights and odors because of the consummate art with which they are presented. But intellectual power and literary workmanship are neither to be admired, nor commended of themselves. They are to be judged by their fruits and are no more justified in producing that which is repulsive or unwholesome than a manufactory whose sole purpose is to create and disseminate bad smells and noxious vapors. Such unsavory establishment might do its work with a wonderful display of skill and most potent results, but the health authorities of society would have ample occasion for taking measures against its obnoxious business, while those who encouraged the introduction of its products into their households would be guilty of inconceivable folly, besides exhibiting a morbid liking for filthy exhalations."

For me, this is one of the must-reads of the Rougon Macquart series show less