Nana Coupeau is a beautiful woman, able to attract men of enormous wealth with the crook of her finger. Part-time prostitute, part-time actress, she makes her debut in a mediocre operetta The Blonde Venus at the bustling Paris World's Fair of 1867. She can't sing, act or dance, yet she is stunning. Nana soon rockets through elite Parisian society, and, blinded by desire, men crawl to her feet, yielding to her every demand. Affections are manipulated, hearts are broken; fortunes are gutted and inheritances squandered. The poverty and violence of Nana's upbringing have led her to a cold and profligate life - a metaphoric indictment of the excesses of France's Second Empire, and a striking example of Zola's Naturalism.
Brutal, gripping and heart wrenching, L'Assommoir (also known as The Drinking Den) chronicles the tragic downward spiral of Gervaise Macquart, a good-natured and hardworking laundress who slides into alcoholism and despair. After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel, Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation and violence. Disturbingly realistic, L'Assommoir is a vivid portrayal of life in late 19th-century Paris.
**Contact Customer Service for Additional Content**
Monsieur Chabre und seine junge Gattin verbringen den Sommer am Meer. Da die Ehe der beiden bisher kinderlos blieb, erhält Monsieur Chabre den ärztlichen Rat, eine strenge Muscheldiät zu halten. Doch Madame Chabre verfolgt ganz andere Pläne, um sich ihren Kinderwunsch zu erfüllen ... Eine der charmantesten Erzählungen des berühmten französischen Romanciers Emile Zola.
Das eintönige Leben des schüchternen Julien wird jäh durch den Anblick der schönen Thérèse am Fenster gegenüber aufgewühlt. In Liebe entbrannt versucht er, sie mit seinem Flötenspiel zu gewinnen. Endlich scheint Thérèse ihn zu erhören, doch der Preis, den Julien dafür zu zahlen hat, ist hoch ...
Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak and raw portrait of unrecognised artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling painter who dreams of conquering Paris’s art scene with his revolutionary ‘open air’ style of painting. Discouraged and mocked, Claude retreats to the countryside with a young woman from Clermont, with whom he has fallen in love, before returning to Paris, where he continues to experience rejection at every turn. Zola’s depiction of a frustrated artist is said to have drawn heavily on the real-life experiences of Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, the latter of whom broke off his friendship with the author upon reading the novel.
Brought to you by Penguin.
Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in northern France under the second empire. At the centre of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a handsome 21 year-old mechanic, intelligent but with little education and a dangerous predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage. Germinal tells the parallel story of Etienne's refusal to accept what he appears destined to become, and of the miners' difficult decision to strike in order to fight for a better standard of life.
(c) 1885, Émile Zola (P) 2019 Penguin Audio
The Markets of Paris is a remarkable work, and is the one which Zola calls his very best novel, and of which he is far more proud than of any others in his Rougon-Marquart series – prouder than of L'Assommoir. It must have been in his early manhood, when poor and friendless, he lived among the people, that much of the information which makes these pages so startlingly vivid, was acquired. How many mornings, long before dawn, must he have visited these markets – how many hours and days must he have spent there, to have mastered the habits, manners and ways of these people, who are a class by themselves, and of whom we do not lose sight, from the beginning to the end of the book. He introduces us to the Parisian charcutier – the cook shop – and in La Belle Lina, the mistress of the establishment, we find the sister of Gervaise, the woman who stirred the depths of our hearts with pity, in L'Assommoir. In truth The Markets of Paris stands as utterly alone in modern French literature, as it is distinct and apart, from any other work even by Zola himself. It is a book for all to read
The elopement of Philippe Cayol, an aspiring liberal, poor and untitled with Blanche De Cazalis, niece of a powerful millionaire and politician sets the stage in this novel full of twists and turns with villains a plenty. Philippe's brother Marius strives to protect the two lovers from the De Cazalis' uncontrolled fury. Although written in his youth Zola's signature style, his indignation about injustice and his vivid characterization of the noble, the wealthy and common man is very evident in this non stop adventure.
Against the backdrop of political and legal corruption in Second Empire France, La Bête Humaine (1890) contrasts the technological advancements of the Machine Age with the primitive and timeless human impulse to possess through killing and to kill through possession. The lives of two railwaymen on the Paris to Le Havre line are fatally entwined by their love for the same woman in this shocking account of brutal violence, greed, revenge and repression. In the wider cast of Zola's characters, too, we see just how close to the surface of civilisation the beast within us lurks.
