I was so happy to finish this piece of Zola's Rougon-Macquart epic as quickly as I usually tear through his books, especially because I'm having so much trouble getting through La Fortune des Rougon. This is no l'Assommoir or Nana, but Le Ventre de Paris falls nicely in place within the series, a...
Somewhere within the spectrum occupied by anything from Romeo and Juliet to Tromeo and Juliet, there is a well-trodden path full of whispers, whimpers and piercing screams about the miseries of the love process. Whether you are tragically in love with your enemy's hottie boomdottie tween daughter...
3.5 starsI imagine a bewildered Émile Zola wandering into the crowds populating that new phenomenon that took Paris merchandising in the 19th century by storm - mass production and the birth of the superstore. He enters through the widely opened arms of polished French doors, having to blink tear...
When I noticed, over on the Classics Circuit blog, that the April tours would focus on French Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola, it seemed like a great opportunity to continue with my pledge to read more literature in French, and expose myself to the father of French naturalism, whose work I had nev...
This work, which will comprise several episodes, is therefore, in my mind, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the first episode, here called The Fortune of the Rougons, should scientifically be entitled The Origin.Author's Preface (1871)When I discovered that...
I read the English translation by Brian Rhys, published (as 'A Priest in the House') by Elek in 1957, long out of print but easy to track down on e-bay and the like. At the time of writing this is the only English translation available aside from the public domain Vizetelly, which I wanted to avo...
As you might expect with Zola, this is a masterpiece of a novel encompassing the personal and political, during the French defeat at Sedan and the Paris Commune. I picked this largely because I have read little about the Commune and even less about Sedan and this seemed like an oversight. The Com...
This is the first classic novel I've delved into for about three months. As much as I like newer novels, this was like a breath of fresh air. This was a better novel than "His Excellency Eugene Rougon" and about as good or better than "The Fortune of the Rougons."This paragraph is for a minor s...
La Goutte d'Or es el escenario en esta obra de Zola, séptima entrega del ciclo narrativo de los Rougon-Macquart, centrada exclusivamente en el proletariado. Los problemas que abundan en los suburbios de la capital, incluso a aquellos que prueban a ganarse la vida con honradez, son los que acechan...
Other editions were also consulted. The first English translation available in England was made by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly in 1894—Money [l’Argent] by Émile Zola (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894). Some earlier translations had appeared in America, where Zola’s novels were translated piecemeal f...
Each December she could count on her asthma keeping her on her back for two and three weeks at a time. She was no longer fifteen, she would be seventy-three on Saint-Anthony’s day. With that she was very rickety, getting a rattling in her throat for nothing at all, though she was plump and stout....
It is set at an angle and so close to the track that it shakes whenever a train goes by. Once seen, it stays imprinted on the memory for ever. Everyone notices it as the train speeds past, but no one knows its history — why it remains locked up, why it stands abandoned, like a ship in distress, i...
He really wasn’t expecting his tenant for another two days at the earliest. He got up quickly as Abbé Faujas appeared in the doorway to the passage. He was a tall, strong man with a wide, square face, and a sallow complexion. Behind him, in his shadow, was an elderly woman who bore a surprising r...