The Earth

This continues my 10 year+ saga of reading the Rougon MacQuart series. This is #15 of 20 in the order I am reading them (order of publication). This is also one I had read previously, many years ago (30 or 40 years) at a time when I read several of the more famous novels in the series (in no particular order Germinal, Nana, L'Assimmoir, and Earth), but I found I remembered nothing of the story.
In this one Zola takes on the peasants/farmers. The rights of farmers to receive fair compensation for their crops were in constant conflict with the rights of the toiling masses (workers) to eat (buy food). Put simply if the farmers are paid more for the crops, food will become too expensive for workers to buy on the measley wages they are paid show more by the wealthy business owners and rulers.
And this one is "earthy" in a way I don't recall having been so in my face when I read it before (or even compared to the ones I've read more recently). Maybe I've only read the translations that were "toned down," rather than more modern translations. In any case, the book abounds with double entendres, and there's lots of imagery of bulls and studs, not to mention the male peasant/farmers constantly grabbing the women and pulling them for a roll in the hay, even when the women protest.
The story focuses on Jean Macquart who has just returned from the Battle of Soferino (so prominent in The Radetzky March), and has hired on as a laborer with the largest and wealthiest famer in the area. The other main characters are members of the Fouan family, who start bickering when the father divides his land among his three children. And the point Zola seems to be making is that for the peasant, land is everything. The characters are brutal and greedy, and will stop at nothing to retain their plots of land. We meet some truly awful characters in this one.
Nevertheless, I would say this remains one of the must-reads of the series.

5 stars show less

When you've already pulled out all the stops, as Zola did in both L'Assommoir and Germinal, how is it possible to go further? Fortunately, Camille Saint-Saëns had shown the way with his third symphony the year before Zola wrote La Terre: all you have to do is end with a complete symphony orchestra in the room in addition to an organ playing full-blast...

This is a book that passes from a gentle, bucolic opening chapter (a man casts his seed on the ground; a teenage girl manipulates a bull's penis...), via fraud, theft, ingratitude, drunken orgies, incest, casual violence and an entire chapter of Rabelaisian farting, to an epic conclusion where rape and murder are brought together with more agricultural disasters than you would find in a show more stack of Thomas Hardy novels. Nothing is done by halves, nothing is swept under the carpets (not that anyone in this book has a carpet), everything that you can think of that's nasty and offensive about human beings is out there, vaunting itself.

Zola's already shown us numerous times that extreme poverty brings out the worst in human nature: here he's having a go at the way being absolutely dependent on possession of land corrupts human relationships in peasant communities, especially in the light of post-revolutionary inheritance laws that force the division of property. Because everyone wants an equal share of the best land, people can't afford to trust their siblings, or their parents, or their children, and fields are reduced to handkerchief size. No-one can afford to marry someone without a useful parcel of land, and there's every incentive to cheat, murder and rape.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that we're living in a world where farmers overseas can produce grain far more cheaply, and where industry in France is putting pressure on the government to keep food prices at a level where domestic farmers can't possibly cover their costs (plus ça change...). Even the progressive "scientific" farmer, Hourdequin, who has a large land-holding acquired cheaply by his father during the dismantling of aristocratic estates, can't make money.

And everyone in the village is corrupt in one way or another. The woman with the superb vegetables? Manures her garden with human waste. The little girl with the geese? Check your pockets after she's gone past. That nice, retired middle-class couple? Owners of the most successful brothel in Chartres. The café proprietor? A cellar full of untaxed wine. The priest? Well, there isn't one, the council can't agree to spend money on repairing the presbytery. And so on.

A book every town-dweller should read before moving to the country! show less

Zola is a comedian, besides an author. Here, he creates a countryside full of screamingly-funny French people. They are ignorant, horrible misers, graspingly greedy, rutting 19-century peasants who live in a farming community to the southwest of Paris. The protagonist, Old Man Fouan, is a bully to his wife and grown children. The story revolves around him deciding to split up his farmland between his three grown children, as he has become too old to work the land anymore, and what happens afterwards.

His sister, called La Grande, the matriarch of the family, is the biggest pennypincher of all. When Buteau, one of Fouan's sons, and his baby mama Lise decide to get married, they come to La Grande's to invite her:
P.148
"They had to repeat show more the invitation 10 times before she ended up glumly accepting.
'All right, since you forced me into it, I'll come. But I wouldn't go to so much trouble for anyone else but you.'
Seeing that they didn't get up and go, she had an internal battle since usually in such circumstances, people offered a glass of wine. She made up her mind and went down to The cellar, even though there was a bottle sitting there, opened. The thing was that, for such an occasion, she had some left over wine which had turned, which she couldn't drink it was so sour, and which she called her 'family' wine. She filled two glasses and watched her nephew and niece so closely that they had to empty them without grimacing so as not to hurt her feelings. They left with their throats on fire."

Lise gets pregnant again, despite Buteau's efforts to "pull out." At the same time that she goes into labor, their cow goes into labor. The cow ends up needing the vet, but Lise's labor came on so suddenly that they had to put her down in the middle of the kitchen, in a makeshift birthing bed on the floor. Two neighbor ladies and Lise's sister are assisting, when the vet, forgetting that a birth is taking place, stumbles into the kitchen, triumphantly holding the calf in his arms. He is naked but for a bloody apron tied around him. This makes them all start laughing:
P.217
"Her laughter was rumbling away in her fat bosom and down into her stomach, where it echoed like a gale of wind. She was completely distended and the child's head had started pumping to and fro again like a cannonball about to be fired.
But the climax came when the vet, putting the calf down in front of him, tried to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He left behind a long streak of dung, like a scar, and they all split their sides with laughter while Lise choked and let out shrill cackles like a hen laying an egg.
'Stop it! You're killing me! Stop it, damn you, I can't take it anymore! Oh, my God, it's bursting.'
The hole gaped even wider, so that you could have imagined that Frimat's wife, still on her knees, was going to fall into it; and all at once, like a human cannonball, the baby shot out, all red, with its extremities pale and dripping wet. All they heard was a gurgle, as if a vast bottle was being empty. Then the baby started crying while its mother went on laughing even more, shaking like a goatskin bottle that was deflating. Cries at one end, laughter at the other. Buteau was slapping his thighs, Bécu's wife was holding her sides, Patoir was guffawing loudly, and even Francoise, whose hand had been crushed by Lise during her last push, finally let herself laugh, but she still saw in her mind's eye her sister's gaping belly as a cathedral big enough to swallow her husband whole."

La Grande's biggest enjoyment is to cause problems between her family members:
P.312
"88 years old, her only concern about her death was to leave her heirs both her fortune and the certainty of endless legal battles over it: an extraordinarily complicated Will, Made confusing for the sheer pleasure of it, meant that under the pretext of not doing wrong by anyone, she would force them to tear each other apart. Her idea, since you couldn't take her goods and chattels with her, was to go off with the consolation at least of knowing that they would poison the rest of the family. She had no greater amusement than to see the family eat away at each other."

I felt sorry for Old Fouan when, one by one, all his family turns him out, until I remember how mean he had been to his wife and children, so I believe he taught them how to behave like that.

Zola's characters will give you many belly laughs, as you read through some of the wildest scenes with the people who inhabit his story. Moreover, the translator's work makes for a true-feeling, smooth read. show less

"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 show more 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. show less

In this novel, set in a farming region not far from Paris, Zola paints a vivid, harsh, and earthy portrait of those who live close to the earth. Although a part of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the family representative here, Jean Macquart (brother of Gervaise from L'assommoir) has far from a starring role. Instead, the Fouan family, and the broader community, are the true centers of the novel. Jean is an outsider to the community and, though he works for a wealthy and "progressive" farmer, Hourdequin, and comes to love a young cousin of the Fouans, Francçoise, he always remains on the periphery of the novel, even though it starts with his initial meeting with Francçoise, as he is sowing grain on Hourdequin's fields and Francçoise comes show more by with her cow, Coliche, who she is taking to be impregnated by a bull of Hourdequin's (a mating which is quite graphically described, setting the tone for the book).

For this novel is full of graphically described elements, from sex, including casual coupling, attempted rape, rape, and even incest, to the smell of manure (an ever-present component of farming), and the equally smelly output of a character who can control his farts and emits them to make a point, make people laugh, and once engage in a competition. Equally graphically described are the commercial ambitions of some of the characters, who each try to take advantage of the others, by attempting to gain control of additional land, by not paying taxes or other obligations, by chlllingly trying to find the paper bonds the elderly Fouan has hidden, and much more. One wealthy couple made their money by running a thriving brothel in a nearby city (Chartres) which had an army garrison.

But the focus of the story is the extended Fouan family. At the beginning of the novel, the elderly Fouan has been convinced (against the advice of his cruel and even more elderly sister known as La Grande) to distribute his land to his three children: the "respectable" Fanny, married to Delhomme; the violent Buteau, who has impregnated but not married his cousin Lise, older sister of Francçoise; and the ne'er-do-well, frequently drunk, poacher, known as "Jesus Christ" for his long hair and beard (he is the at-will farter). They are supposed to pay him and his wife a pension, but only Fanny and Delhomme do. Over the course of the 10 years of the novel, the readers sees the downward spiral of Fouan, especially after his wife dies an horrific death, partly brought on by the violence of Buteau, and he goes to live with each of his children in turn. In fact, a number of the characters die violent, and indeed often gruesome, deaths, including a granddaughter of La Grande who dies basically from overwork and a character who dies from being pushed onto a scythe.

Many many other characters and subplots are featured in this novel, way too many for me to go into. Some of them involve the way the community interacts with the priest who initially has to come from another town and the sad fate of many of the "Daughters of Mary" who are supposed to set shining examples for other girls, the competition between two innkeepers, the threat of conscription and the various means of avoiding it (interestingly, for a reader who grew up in the Vietnam war era, they have a lottery in which higher numbers mean safety from conscription), the threat of cheap grain from the US which lowers the price the local farmers can get, the grumblings of "radicals," the burden of taxation and financial shenanigans, "scientific" farming, sexual scheming, the economics of keeping a brothel, politics, and on and on. Throughout it all, Zola describes the very hard and endless work of the farmers, including the women, providing vivid portraits of sowing, harvesting, and all the steps in between, keeping animals, and harvesting grapes and making wine, and of the natural world, including storms and searing heat, that so affect the lives of farmers.

I have barely scratched the surface of this novel. As with many of Zola's works, it has a tendency towards the melodramatic, especially at the end; however, it stands up there with his best works. show less

Gripping drama circulating around a family in 19th Century rural France. What strikes me is how cruel the people could be to their own family members all to secure their own small bit of wealth or land. One example is the old La Grande, 'reassuring' her family that she would leave something for everyone in her will, saying "I'm ninety now. I'll be leaving you one of these days." But the next paragraph goes on to say, "But she didn't believe a word of it, for she was convinced she would never die; her obstinate love of property was too strong. She would bury them all...she stood among the tombs without any emotion, feeling merely curious abuot why other people were so sorry to die."

There are two English translations of La Terre, the first was by Henry Vizetelly in 1888, it is freely available on Internet Archive, Gutenberg and in later re-prints. Vizetelly was jailed for 3 months for indecency by uptight Victorians, but he really should have been jailed for the bowdlerizations. Luckily in 1980 Parmee made an excellent translation for Penguin Classics (The Earth), which, as of this review, is the most recent available. Amazon lists it as out of print but this is not accurate, it can still be purchased new (but apparently not on Amazon!). The problem is Penguin recycles it's ISBN numbers so the original 1980 Penguin edition is out print and the new 1990's edition (new cover, same otherwise) is not showing up in show more Amazon's database.

La Terre never entirely succeeds as Germinal did, the work most comparable. It is an ambitious book that could have been epic and one of his very best, but Zola tries to do too much and the energy is diffused. There are over 100 named characters, many with multiple names making at least 150 names, plus the many interrelated family relationships between each. This requires significant genealogical memory and the reward is not entirely satisfying. Zola was trying to recreate a whole rural farming village but aesthetically it didn't come together. Unlike in Germinal which has class struggle for a brighter future, there is no larger theme of social justice. The first 200 pages are slow, and the final 50 are like an antiquated picaresque Dickens novel with all the loose ends tied up in an epic single afternoon of action. However unlike Dickens there are no happy endings here!

On the positive side, it's Emile Zola. Zola is a genius at choosing and describing detail so the reader has a fair idea what "A Day in the Life of a Peasant" was like, and the book is worth reading for its anthropological aspects alone. It is comically scatological, which Zola did on purpose since the novel is about the earth (night soil, etc..), "dark humor" at its best, who knew Zola could be so funny. But this comes across a bit pejorative, highlighting the worst aspects of the rural and poor.

It's not a bad novel, but I don't think it achieved what Zola intended, and aesthetically isn't as fully realized as Germinal. If your a fan of Zola you will probably enjoy it, but not before some of his better known works.

While reading I wished I had a complete list of the characters. Afterward, I have found in an old book called "A Zola Dictionary" (1912) which I re-formatted for the web as The Annotated list of characters in Emile Zola's La Terre.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd show less