L'Assommoir

In his Preface to L'Assommoir, Zola said it "...is without doubt the most moral of my books". While it can certainly be read as a stand alone, in the development of his Rougon-Macquart series, it was also a necessary one, linking many of Zola's characters from the earlier suggested reading order and setting them up for the great novels to come. Most of all though, this was an inspired book.

Pretty novels of manners and dresses have no appeal to me, nor do more contemporary novels of the middle class. It is books where the characters have an edge to them, where life isn't comfortable, where social ills are given a realistic human face that I remember and that make me think. This novel is certainly in that category.

Gervaise is the main show more character of this novel, of that class so insignificant that she is only ever referred to by a single name, never even granted a family name. She was a twenty-two year old laundress with two young sons, Claude and Etienne and a ne'er do well lover Lantier. Lantier left her almost immediately after the start of the novel, and she then married Coupeau the roofer. Coupeau was a decent enough young man, willing to provide for her children, but lacking ambition. Seven years went by. There was now a three year old daughter, Nana. Then Coupeau fell from a roof. Although Gervaise was able to open a laundry on her own with a loan from her neighbour Goujet, the fall was the beginning of the end. Gervaise was from the Macquart side of the family, so Zola's readers would know that she was doomed from the start. The outward manifestation of her tainted background was her limp, which her mother attributed to the beatings she had received when pregnant with Gervaise.

Zola had said of the people in L'Assommoir, "... my characters are not bad, but only ignorant and spoilt by the environment of grinding toil and poverty in which they live". Gervaise was not a bad person, on the contrary, she was quite well meaning. While Coupeau was recovering from his fall, she encouraged him to take off more time, to join his friends for a drink, even giving him money despite their precarious financial state. Slowly Coupeau slid into drunken states, into alcoholism, until he was no longer employable. Encouraged by him, Gervaise started drinking too, at first hoping to slow him down, later desperately and on her own.

In his Preface, Zola also said

I wanted to depict the downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas. The logical sequel to drunkenness and indolence is the loosening of family ties, the filth of promiscuity, the progressive loss of decent feelings and, as the climax, shame and death. It is morality in action, just that.

Leonard Tancock, who translated this edition, suggests that Zola felt it was this depiction which had the publishers of Le Bien Public drop the serialization, not out of any horror at the conditions of the working class, or at his language, but rather out of an ideology that saw the working class as downtrodden heroes, oppressed by the upper classes, depictions familiar to contemporary readers from [Les Misérables], rather than as the everyday flawed people Zola portrayed.

As the reader follows Gervaise, Coupeau and the returned Lantier through to the end though, it is clear Zola has given us the picture he sought in images only he could create, in writing one of the best books of the nineteenth century.

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In his Introduction, the translator Leonard Tancock writes of the difficulty of translating the word l'assommoir. He says it "means literally 'the place where you can get knocked out', hence its use as meaning a pub where you can get knock-out drops and forget all your troubles. He doesn't hold with earlier translations such as 'dram shop' which didn't quite strike him as being of the people.
My own translation would be 'howff', a place that would never have been dignified with the designation of 'pub', or even of 'tavern'. show less

An unremittingly bleak narration of the descent into poverty and death of Gervaise, who in kindly and has opportunities but inevitably gets beaten up by men and beaten down by neighbours until she cracks. Zola was remarkable for his time in taking a cold, hard look at the depravations of working-class society and their predilictions to drink themselves to the grave. He does not moralise, and the style is occasionally amusing. But good grief it is depressing! This is one of the most painful reads ever, at a point I could not stomach it anymore and started to surf the words rather than dive in deep. Once the serial abuser Lantier reappeared on the scene I could barely continue, it was like watching a horror story with fingers over my eyes.

The seventh book in the cycle follows Gervaise, a young woman from the Macquart side of the family, who works as a laundress and has moved from Provence to Paris with her unreliable man, the hatter Lantier, and their two young sons. When we first meet her, Lantier is in the process of pawning all their remaining belongings in order to run off with another woman. By hard graft, Gervaise gets out of that mess, and several further ones, but each time she gets knocked back down her will to survive is progressively lessened, and the short-term pleasures of drink start to look more appealling.

If you'd been a 19th century French reader following the publication of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle in real time, you'd already have been aware by 1877 show more that you had to be ready for anyhting, and there was no knowing what he would do next. All the same, L'Assommoir must have been a shock. Thanks to Dickens and others, there were plenty of novels about poverty, the evils of gin, exploitation and debt. But they were always novels written from a safely middle-class viewpoint: most of the time the central character found himself in the slums as a result of malice or mistaken identity and was rescued by a generous benefactor as soon as his true identity came out, and invariably the narrative voice was that of an educated, respectable middle-class person who knew where to stop to avoid shocking his readers.

Zola, of course, is a writer who has rarely been suspected of knowing where to stop. In this case, he took an approach that now seems absolutely obvious, but must have been alarming to contemporaries: he gave his omniscient third-person narrator a descriptive voice using a very slightly more grammatical version of the same coarse Parisian argot that his characters spoke in. We're not allowed to take a step back into our safe, middle-class world: we have to see his characters from their own perspective, bounded by their own fears and ambitions. And it's not a very pleasant place to be. Work is miserable and ill-rewarded; the limited amount of fun you can have is always undermined by the knowledge that it's costing you money you can't afford; saving and hard work can give you a better life, but the least accident will upset all your plans and send you back down to the bottom again. And don't even think about getting old unless you have children who are earning well enough to keep you.

The raw language is one of the chief pleasures of this book, and we get fewer than usual of Zola's lush descriptions (plenty of descriptions of lushes, though!). But the restricted vocabulary he imposes on himself doesn't stop him giving us a couple of unforgettable backdrops - the steamy laundry (setting for a ludicrously erotic water-fight in the opening chapter), the forge, the squalid apartment building where most of the characters live, and of course the gin-palace, the Assommoir of the title, with its bubbling still in the background. And a couple of very memorable parties, but also lots of painfully graphic descriptions of the kind of behaviour that poverty, desperation and gin can lead people into, culminating in the scary scenes of Gervaise's husband dying in delirium tremens in the lunatic asylum. show less

I run the risk, with Zola, of being biased and excessively rapturous. Well, you know what? I try to do it so rarely that you can just put up with it, in this instance!

L'Assomoir, translated roughly as The Drinking Den or sometimes The Dram Shop is the seventh in Zola's 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series and, famously, it's the one that made him a household name in Third Republic France. Zola should be required reading for all people of a left-wing persuasion: he's fiercely angry about the state of society, the ways in which individuals vote against their own interests due to ill education or a quick buck, the destructive forces of poverty and inequality upon people's ability to make smart decisions, and - especially - to the show more short-sighted hypocrisy of moral reformers and snobs, who proliferated throughout France during its last period of Empire, between 1851 and 1870, which this series chronicles. He is a core text in 19th century class-conscious critiques, with the eye of a 20th century sociologist, always seeking a dozen root causes for a problem when lesser minds - sometimes minds in power - would settle for one. "People wouldn't be poor if they didn't waste their lives on drink and sex!" said the wealthy (who - as the author has chronicled in earlier instalments - waste much of their life on same). "Perhaps", Zola retorts, "we should ask why they drink and have sex, and whether they really had any chance of escaping poverty to begin with."

In the character of Gervaise, a washerwoman torn between three men, various children from different fathers, and a monotonous life broken up only by bouts of injury, brutality, or drunken joy, Zola found a character to enrage and enrapture the literati of Paris in equal measure. As the novel was serialised, readers couldn't tell whether the author was creating a story of a sinner's moral downfall, or just enjoying creating a scandal ("being a pornographer", as his critics called him until his dying day).

But, really, he is doing neither. And this is the point. Zola should also be read by those of a right-wing persuasion. Gervaise's downfall is upsetting. (It's a cakewalk compared to some of the truly brutal, exhausting lives of others, notably an 8-year-old girl acting as mother to her two baby siblings, and as a lighting rod for the graphically-written beatings of her father, widowed by his own hand.) But the lives of Gervaise and all of her compatriots in the working-class neighbourhood near the outer wall of Paris are logical extensions of the society in which they live. It is here that the great overall structure of the Rougon-Macquart comes into play. The opulent "elegant decay" of The Kill. The dog-eat-dog world of food market Les Halles in The Belly of Paris (centering around Gervaise's sister Lisa, who perhaps unreasonably does not appear in this book). And most notably His Excellency Eugène Rougon, in which Gervaise's cousin Eugene rises in politics by treating Paris and all of her complex social issues as mere means to an end. If L'Assomoir scandalised France, Zola wanted to say, they should take a long, hard look at themselves.

While the novel is lengthy and often grim, it is also very funny. Zola and Dickens are incredibly different in their structure and approach, although they played similar roles in their respective cultures. But whereas Dickens was a social reformer in the classical sense, with his one-dimensional, honest-but-down-on-their-luck poor, Zola doesn't let his characters off lightly. There are dozens of characters populating Gervaise's world, and they're filled with delightful contradictions, peccadilloes that others excuse on dubious moral grounds, and a constant need to judge others behind their back, all the while assuring everyone that they're not being judgmental, no, of course not. Zola is at his best (as always) in his grand set-pieces, most notably the day of Gervaise's wedding, which commences with a ceremony that no-one wishes to attend, a backlogged Town Hall more interested in bureaucracy than romance, a tipsy tour of the Louvre by a group of people who wouldn't know art if it bit them on the behind, and a messy all-night banquet which leaves the wait staff regretting that they ever agreed to hire the place out to a bunch of white trash.

Even Gervaise, whose tragedy this is, receives countless opportunities to make good decisions, and almost never does so. Zola is showcasing the complexity of poverty, the inevitable human need to prioritise short-term gain over long-term reward when one is in dire straits, but he never (well, rarely) forgets that his characters are also characters. No-one acts the way they do just because of their social tribe; we are all individuals, and he knows this.

As in every one of his novels, Zola chooses an overarching style. Here, his narrative voice is the town gossip. It's an incredible challenge for a translator, as even the omniscient narration is always in character, bursting with slang and catty tangents. Margaret Mauldon's translation seems to be up to the task.

There's always one caveat in a Zola novel, and here it's his lifelong belief (bear in mind he was born in 1840!) that, on a scientific, even genetic level, a woman's first lover "imprints" himself upon her. This was the subject of Zola's early novel Madeleine Férat and resurfaces here, although not in such a way that makes the novel feel outdated. Gervaise's actions (unlike Madeleine's) still feel like their own.

So, in closing, this is quite a book. Every instalment of the Rougon-Macquart is also a history lesson. Zola was chronicling a twenty-year period in France's history, and has left us with a remarkable multifaceted view of a city - a world - in all its iridescent, hypocritical, vibrant, noisy, depressing glory. When L'Assommoir was published in book form in 1877, it was an instant bestseller and, instantly, the previous six books in the series was back in print and selling like gold. While he had been a recognisable figure to Parisians since he began publishing books in the mid-1860s, Zola at last had financial stability, and could convincingly present himself as the leading author of his generation. (Luminaries Flaubert and Hugo - both of whom were reaching the end of their life - seem to have looked upon him with a mix of respect and dismay!) Now he could sit back and write the remaining 13 volumes of his series encompassing an entire era of French history. No big deal. show less

Gervaise comes to Paris with her lover and their two children. Lantier, her partner, deserts her but she soon drifts into marriage with a solid workingman. All goes smoothly until this husband, Coupeau, is injured on the job. Good-hearted Gervaise nurses him back to health though not back to work but still, through the good graces of an infatuated neighbour, she acquires her own business. She is successful--to her neighbours' envy--but at the acme of her happiness Lantier reappears and gradually her life falls into decline.

A couple of things that interest me about the story are Gervaise's tragic flaw and Zola's scheme. Gervaise has ambition and spirit, but what ultimately drags her down is nothing more her willingness to go with the show more flow. Neither she nor any of the other characters is wicked or altogether intolerable (except for the dreadul Lalie); their failings are not on a grand scale. Nor do Zola's notions of the primacy of heredity need to be used to account for these people's foibles. The environment of poverty he describes is sufficient for that.

There are despite the bleakness comic scenes and characters (Mme Lerat, e.g., who though brooking no obscenities manages to find a salacious meaning in the most innocent of remarks). And though I usually merely tolerate descriptive passages, Zola's descriptions bring an immediacy and sensuality that no one else's do. I loathe over-heated rooms and the smell of meat cooking, but how I long to be at that name-day feast; I've no interest in 19th-century laundry techniques and I dislike violence, but Zola makes me want to stand at that laundry door and watch the women washing and brawling; I'm not given to fondling teenagers, but golly, Nana sounds squeezable. After finishing the book I looked up into a bright autumnal sky and felt a tiny bit of what it must be to be cold and starving and looking up into a yellow dusk over a city with the smell of snow in the air.

I've read L'assomoir four or five times and still I enjoy and admire it enormously. Please give it a try. show less

Another stunning, beautiful, gritty, and tragic novel set during the Second Empire of France. Zola paints a tragic portrait of Gervaise Macquart (from the ill-fated Macquart side of the of Rougon-Macquart family tree) at a moment in her life when she experiences temporary happiness and contentment that is slowly and surely eroded and chipped away by the machinery of modernization. The imagery of humans beings reverting to animals in their habitats, relationships, desires, appetites, and ambitions, against the backdrop of a fast-modernizing Paris, is going to be something that sticks with me. And the subtle and not-so subtle allusions to people being eaten alive by their circumstances is disturbing especially when contrasted with earlier show more imagery of the main characters devouring their own meals with similar relish during happier times.

Highly recommended.

It did not occur to me until quite late in the novel that Gervaise's and Lantier's son, Etienne, is the same Etienne from Germinal. I get it now about the place of these novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, so maybe I shouldn't have started the series with novels published about 3/4 of the way through the series. Time to go back and start on #1. show less

The experience of reading 'L'Assommoir' is a great deal like [b:Trainspotting|135836|Trainspotting (Mark Renton #2)|Irvine Welsh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353033083l/135836._SY75_.jpg|1087421]. Both are grim as fuck depictions of addiction and urban poverty that never spare you a squalid and disgusting detail. Both were considered shocking when first published. Both are very well written but viscerally unpleasant to read due to all the domestic violence, vomiting, death, etc. I had to alternate 'L'Assommoir' with various lighter fantastical novels in order to get through it. The other Zola fiction I've read was hardly cheery, but had more sweeping themes and social analysis to give the reader show more a little distance. The over-academic introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of 'L'Assommoir' attempts to defend it from accusations of sidestepping politics, notably by pointing out that it was published during the repressive period a few years after the Commune. Again like [b:Trainspotting|135836|Trainspotting (Mark Renton #2)|Irvine Welsh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353033083l/135836._SY75_.jpg|1087421], it has a very claustrophobic feeling. The characters are trapped in tenements within specific urban areas by the misery of addiction and poverty. The introduction makes much of a trip to the Louvre that marks a rare exception, over-emphasising its importance in my view. The reader spends the majority of the novel in a very limited number of cramped and decaying domestic and work spaces.

'L'Assommoir' follows Gervaise, a young woman who begins the novel living with her two children and their feckless father, who got her pregnant when she was 14 and did not marry her. The narrative covers more than twenty years of her subsequent life, skipping over calmer and happier times to focus on the most degrading and horrible moments. About two thirds of the way through, I looked in concern at how many pages were left and wondered how much worse things could get. I've read [b:Germinal|28407|Germinal|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1628108206l/28407._SY75_.jpg|941651] so already knew that you can rely upon Zola to always make things more appalling. Gervaise's descent from running a laundry to utter penury and hopelessness is told in torturous detail. She is effectively dragged down by her husband Coupeau's alcoholism, which is depicted in an exhaustive and repulsive fashion. Once he's started drinking heavily, Coupeau becomes close friends with Gervaise's former partner Lantier, who moves into their home and restarts his affair with Gervaise. The family gradually loses everything, including their daughter Nana who runs away to become a sex worker (and star in [b:Nana|371456|Nana|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174236758l/371456._SY75_.jpg|89633]). At the very end, Coupeau suffers prolonged and grotesque death agonies due to alcoholism then Gervaise dies quietly of hunger and cold. She is ultimately abandoned by all her friends, family, and neighbours. Although she had tempestuous relationships with most of them, the narrative does depict her as an instinctively kind and generous person. Poverty and booze sour all bonds.

Whether it was Zola's intention to emphasise this or not, the men are all terrible in a range of different ways. The best that can be said of a few (Goujet and Old Bru) is that they're passive rather than destructive. Lantier is a monstrous parasite, who sucks Gervaise dry of money and love then moves onto another victim. Coupeau is at first a cheerful man, who transforms into an abusive brute thanks to alcohol. Gervaise is not without spirit, initiative, and good intentions, but ultimately she becomes the victim of these two men. I found her spiky dynamics with the other women in her family interesting. The physically claustrophobic settings are also psychologically stifling, as the family and their neighbours are all stuck in proximity regardless of fallings-out and long-standing resentments.

In the Oxford World's Classics edition, the translator's note was much more enlightening than the introduction. 'L'Assommoir' is extremely difficult to translate, as Zola deliberately used coarse slang and obscenities of the time. It's hard enough to get the sense of 150 year old colloquialisms in your native language, let alone in translation. I think Margaret Mauldon does a very good job with this, although occasionally I felt that 'bleeding' or 'bloody' could have been stronger. Maybe I'm projecting 21st century sensibilities there. The translation does include swearing, including memorably: 'Off to Cayenne with your fucking emperor and his band of pigs!' There is also an especially appalling scene in which an eight year old girl is beaten nearly to death by her father (and dies not long after), which matches harsh language to horrific actions:

"Oh you shit of a man!" [Gervaise] yelled. "Leave her alone, you brute! I'll set the police on you, I will!"
Bijard growled like an animal that's thwarted. He stammered: "Listen, old stumpy, mind your own fuckin' business. D'you expect me to wear gloves to flog her?"

Bijard has already beaten his wife to death at this point. If you like the sound of [b:Trainspotting|135836|Trainspotting (Mark Renton #2)|Irvine Welsh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353033083l/135836._SY75_.jpg|1087421] set in mid-19th century Paris, 'L'Assommoir' is the novel for you. I found it too relentlessly grim for my current mood and got less from it than the other Zola novels I've read. While it is an astonishing accomplishment and undoubtedly worth the effort, I'm probably too squeamish to truly appreciate it. The eating scenes definitely convinced me that I wouldn't get on with [b:The Belly of Paris|92965|The Belly of Paris|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388455590l/92965._SX50_.jpg|10242]. I do want to read more of the Rougon-Marquart novels, though, as Zola's insight and powers of description are incredible. show less