Emile Zola

as a text on social structure i think it's great, but as a novel i was bored. though there's a whipping scene at the beginning that is ACES.

I really really liked The Earth, which is positively King Learish, and it's got a laugh-out loud funny subplot about flatulence which occupies dozens of pages over the coarse (heh, intentional) of the novel. And La Bete Humaine (Human Beast) is my favorite since it's the most melodramatic and reads like a cheapo early film reel with a mustache twirling baddie rerouting traintracks (really! only it's a woman and she derails the train of a man who spurned her because he had psychopathic urges!)

Anything in the Rougon-MacQuart cycle is good, and there's really no need to read them in order. Or read more than one or two, unless you really like them... and that's not terribly hard to do.

Reading them in sequence after reading the first one was helpful as there is some continuity - but hardly necessary - the books stand well on their own.

I found them compelling and unforgettable - but not as good in translation as in French.

I'd like to recommend "Au Bonheur Des Dames" (in english as "The Ladies Paradise") from the series as being one of my favorites.

recently discovered this. i have but haven't read Germinal and was looking up the book that the film Human Desire was based on (bete humaine) and, hey ho, here's a set of 20 books and i do love a list.

Oxford World Classics has translated all of them recently, surprisingly the first full translation since 18xx, which was half-arsed by all accounts. penguin has 8 or so of them, much cheaper. but they are all 600+ pages. i should read the one i already have, see how it goes.

my favourite writer!

I attempted to blog my way through Les Rougon-Macquart a while back, here's the ones I got through

introduction

#1 – La Fortune des Rougon (1871)

#2 – La Curée (1871-2)

#3 – Le Ventre de Paris (1873)

#4 – La Conquête de Plassans (1874)

#5 – La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875)

fuck off gareth

i think you might have more choice of translation now

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/series/oxford-world-s-classics-12

https://www.penguin.co.uk/search-results?tab=books&q=Emile-Zola&x9=author&q9=Emile-Zola 7 here

Haven't read his books, but was recently impressed by his heroic part in the Dreyfus Affair, which may have cost him his life---see epic wiki article on the Affair.

halfway through Oxford Classics version of L'Assommoir, the Saints Day party. and i have the feeling it's all downhill from here.

https://azleslie.com/posts/zola-reading-order/

found this ^ and plumped for the 10 book version as a compromise. can always full in the gaps later.

I enjoyed Le Ventre de Paris last fall.

finished l'assommoir. depressing.

Nana, i'm sure, will be a laugh a minute.

Read Germinal last year. Not sure where to go next.

his mother is the focus of L'Assommoir, his sister is Nana, his brother is the guy in The Masterpiece...

in the link i posted just up a bit there are several reading orders which make more sense than publication date. i just choose one i thought I'd manage (5 wasn't enough, 20 was too many. that said, the 10 doesn't include a couple that sound interesting so i might end up with 12)

Oxford World Classics publish them all, Penguin don't, and i wanted modern translations because the older ones apparently censor bits. they show up as discounted on the ebook sites quite often too (The Beast Within currently 70% of 6, for instance)

(70% off)

Nana is a bit slower to get into. needs more fighting like the previous one.

yeah, Nana not as salacious as i thought it would be and the end was pretty gruesome smallpox as a substitute for syphilis but the theatre setting made this less interesting to me.

tempted to do the other two children of Gervaise first, just because they are Railways and Art. but that list i'm following has The Fortune next...

I think I'll read The Masterpiece next.

That's one of my favourites, interested to see what you think about it.

i think i mentioned it in this month's reading thread but i read another 3 of these

The Fortune Of The Rougons
The Kill
Au Bonheur des Dames

(is rougons a hard g or a soft g? i don't think i've ever heard anyone say it)

wasn't enamoured by the scheming and the greed in the first two but did enjoy the romance in the first. the department store in the last was more interesting.

currently on The Earth. no notes in the penguin edition, which is disappointing.

i was disappointed that the description of the wine as dog's piss isn't in the original french (junk)

i like that the title "The Earth" has such an interesting dual meaning in English which it doesn't have in French.

La Terre originally. Gutenberg has a copy translated as The Soil. Oxford world classics just has Earth.

i read it on holiday in Austria when I was 18, remember lots of great quotes about farting Jesus

couple of time he (well, this translation) uses the word 'blue' in a strange way:

"licking his lips in anticipation of blueing the lot"

"that they'd blue it altogether"

seems to be a replacement for 'blow' but is that ok, or an OCR error or a mishearing during transcription (blow / blew / blue)?

there haven't been many ocr errors in this penguin edition, unlike the last few. i am surprised. still miffed about the lack of notes though.

(there was more blueing later. and i looked up a scan and it's in there too, so not an ocr problem)

gah, i left the intro until the end in case it contained spoilers and then it went and gave away the outcome of The Debacle and Dr Pascal as well.

The Earth is obviously serialised - 20ish pages per chapter with something big happening every time - in a way that i never feel with Dickens. and so much bloodier and x-rated despite being only 20 years later. but i think that might be because it's a modern translation so you've modern sensibilities creeping in.

Is "blueing the lot" in the context of spending all your money? Because that's how I've seen it before.

Found it! In Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers:

"So far as I can see, there's nothing to prevent you from drawing a cheque for fifty thousand and blueing the lot."

yes, exactly that. I've always seen 'blowing' and can't find that usage of blue in any dictionary I've looked in.

oh and there was offense taken at the time according to Wikipedia

"The publication of an English translation of La Terre in 1888 led to the prosecution for obscenity of the publisher, Henry Vizetelly."

and the intro mentions it being singled out in a manifesto by other naturalist writers in France who thought it near pornographic

(this is the penguin edition from 1980, Oxford world classics have translated it again in 2016, maybe it'd need interesting to compare. maybe when I've done the remainders)

Where should I start with Zola then? I've had Germinal on the shelves for some years now.

Germinal is a good place to start!

The Masterpiece was only my second -- it worked.

choose one based on subject perhaps?

L'assommoir - alcoholism / laundry
Germinal - mining
The Earth - farming
Nana - prostitution
Beast Within - railways
The Masterpiece - art
The Lady's Desire - department store
The Debacle - war

but Germinal is a good start, seeing as it's there.

i've been following the 10-book list from here
https://azleslie.com/posts/zola-reading-order/
and plan to add the art and railway books to that because i am generally enjoying them

It occurs to me as I read Money, my third Zola, that Trollope covered politics and money with Zola's meticulousness but could not because of English conventions write forthrightly about sex and power: he has to sentimentalize the Palliser novels, which I admire a great deal, with daughters and their fathers who disapprove of their marriages. Meanwhile in the Zola novel we learn that its protagonist Saccard raped a young girl against a staircase -- and it's written offhandedly.

The Earth starts with a cow being serviced by a bull (with manual intervention) and goes from there rapes, incest, murder of a pregnant woman, murder by burning alive whilst children watch. dickens it is not.

to end the month I've been reading the Four Short Stories thing from Gutenberg (3/4s of which is Nana which I've already read). The first story has 4 chapters of Prussians besieging a mill and 4 lines at the end saying they rebuilt the mill and lived happily ever after. it is a bit abrupt.

The Belly of Paris is a good one, on the frustrations of political organising and the rancidness of the petite bourgeoisie

L'Œuvre / His Masterpiece is really fucking sad, if you want to be really fucking sad.

Those were the first two I read.

Just about to crack into the last chapter of The Masterpiece, just after the disastrous dinner party. Hoping everyone can turn it around.

I finished Money, my least favorite of the three novels I've read. Too crowded a canvas! So many supporting characters, none vividly rendered. I pulled my volume of Henry James crit from my shelf and found this passage in his essay/obit on Zola:

What the reader easily discerns in him is the sturdy resolution with which breadth and energy supply the place of penetration. He rests to his utmost on documents, devours and assimilates them, makes them yield him extraordinary appearances of life; but in his way he too improvises in the grand manner, the manner of Walter Scott and of Dumas the elder.

Breadth and energy Money's got, especially when the entire edifice of finance + speculation collapses: more daring than what American novelists risked during our own Gilded Age.

I gotta read Germinal.

Court intrigue is my least favourite mode of Zola novel, I just don't really care about it. Have not read Money but it sounds a bit too much like La Curée AKA The Kill, which is my least favourite of the books I've read - it also shows off his annoying puritan anti-decadence streak, which is the most tiresome element to his generally sound politics.

My ranking of the 11 I've read from best to worst:

Germinal (1885)
L'Œuvre (1886)
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
La Terre (1887)
La Bête humaine (1890)
L'Assommoir (1877)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
Nana (1880)
La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
La Conquête de Plassans (1874)
La Curée (1872)

La Terre and Nana were my favorites of your list. So sordid!