Zola, Emile

Germinal (Penguin Classics)
Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • Accurate: Captured the Spirit!
  • Germinal is a work of genius by Zola the master of literary naturalism
  • Readers of the world, unite!
  • From the Mines to Revolution-A Masterpiece
  • The best novel of the 19th Century
 Germinal (Penguin Classics)
Émile Zola
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140447423
Release Date: 2004-05-25

Book Description

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Accurate: Captured the Spirit!.......2007-05-10

This was my first read of Zola, an author who is FAR too unknown in the US. He captured, fully, the essence of a labor dispute. I've been around an industrial area my whole life, and have been through many strikes, plus have been the target of those who don't like you crossing their lines. Zola brought all this to life; he told it just as it really is. Incredible!

5 out of 5 stars Germinal is a work of genius by Zola the master of literary naturalism.......2006-09-27

Germinal was the name of a new month (Feb.-March) created by the leaders of the French Revolution. Zola's novel is given this title. The novel is set in the 1860s dealing with the brutal, harsh, amoral, poverty stricken, violent and cruel world of a French mining town whose name is
"240.
The main character of the novel is Etienne Lantier who is a member of a family featuring in several of Zola's novels in his Roquet-Macquart series dealing with two families charted by the brilliant novelist.
During the novel the reader will become engrossed by the families who toil deep under the surface of the earth. The mine is a symbol of Moloch the rapacious idol who gorges itself on human flesh, lives and love.
The novel is not for the prudish. In its many pages you will be exposed to sex in all its varieties; scatological language; several murders; genital mutilation; several horrible deaths and a strike. You will even see cruelty to animals written with such heartbreaking realism that you will cry over the deaths of the horses Trumpet and Battle and the rabbit
Poland.
You will meet various political and social theories from Marxism to nihilism expressed through the eloquent voices of the characters. You will be invited into the tragic home of the Maheu family and discover there the unforgettable character of La Maheu the indomitable earth mother and her suffering and prepubescent daughter who falls in love with the stranger Etienne. Catherine and her two lovers Chaval and Etienne are indelibly printed in the mind's eye of this reviewer. Miners trapped deep within the earth in a disaster instigated by the anarchist Souvarine lead to scenes which are horrific in their impact.
Emile Zola was a reformer whose novel is a classic which is also a page turner. Each page bristles with his rage at injustice, cruelty and the clash between the classes in France.
What would Zola have thought of the bloody twentieth century of revolution in Russia, two horrible world wars and now in our own century the hell of Middle Eastern warfare and terrorism.?
Germinal reads as if it was written last week since it is alive with all the human emotions. It is one of the best books ever written and will always live. Vive la France! Vive Emile Zola!

5 out of 5 stars Readers of the world, unite!.......2006-09-11

Germinal is a damned good book. A page-turner. Engrossing. Illuminating, too. The proletariat/capitalist conflict is better portrayed here than in any other work of fiction I've come across. One gets a sense of the conditions--granting Zola a degree of literary embellishment--that led to trade unionism, socialism, communism, and anarchism. Zola sides with the workers, as you'd expect, but he is honest about his characters' motivations. They are presented as three-dimensional, not didactic dummies for Zola to ventriloquize through. Zola's characters are so fleshed-out, in fact, that the reader develops a rapport, an emotional investment, with them. Not all make it through the book alive and well, and this is another refreshing bit of truth from Zola. Life is full of calamity, pain, and senseless suffering, but it continues nevertheless. Zola presents this without typical Gallic pretension...a worthy achievement in and of itself. A definite classic.

5 out of 5 stars From the Mines to Revolution-A Masterpiece.......2006-06-21

As an aspiring author of regional fiction ("Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh" ISBN 0972005064)who was raised on liberal politics amidst the boom and bust of Minnesota's iron mines and timber industry, "Germinal's" featured protagonist, Etienne Lantier, strikes a chord with me. There is much about the American labor movement and the plight of American workers to be found in Etienne's story. Though conditions in our factories, mines, and in our forests have markedly improved since the days of children working the coal fields of West Virginia and the iron mines of the Mesabi Iron Range, Zola's prose and his social observations about wealth, capital, and the exploitation of the common man by those in power rings true in 21st century America. A beautifully translated work, succinctly direct, wonderfully cast, with prose that makes you sigh. One of my ten all time favorite novels.

5 out of 5 stars The best novel of the 19th Century.......2006-05-02

This is ?mile Zola's undisputed masterpiece in the Rougon-Macquart novel series. In each of the novels of this series Zola sketches in honest, human detail the life of the working class of 19th Century France; in Germinal, the center of attention is the mining industry of the far north.

The story describes the experience of an ex-machinist, Etienne Lantier (who appears as such in one of the other novels) in the Voreux and other mines around the town of Montsou, situated somewhat near Valenciennes. Starving and looking for a job in a period of industrial crisis, he is introduced to the reader as he arrives at the mine. Etienne soon manages to get a job there, and gets to know the great variety of characters that make up the local mining town. But his deep-felt social activism, combined with his somewhat higher education than the local miners, sets in motion a chain of events that changes both his life and that of the reader forever.

Zola's brilliant description of the reality of the struggle between classes and the effects, positive and negative, that zealous struggle for the improvement of the world can have on individual humans in dire straits is sure to haunt the reader for a long time. The author manages to describe both the miners, in their jealousy, pride, poverty and despair, as well as the local bourgeoisie in their misguidedness, personal issues and the pressures of capitalism with a deep understanding of the human psyche. The interactions between humans under pressure is described in powerful, terse dialogues and evocative passages.

The political and social background of the miners' desperate struggle for a decent living is the general theme of the book, but Zola avoids stereotypes and never clearly takes sides for any particular political position, deftly avoiding preachiness or sentimentalism. The incredible hardship and difficulty of the miners' lives and the degree to which the main characters manage to maintain a sense of dignity is sure to move even the coldest-hearted person, but Germinal is not a Dickens work and tear-jerking is more an effect of the book's quality than the goal of the writer.

Above all, however, Zola's best work is simply an incredibly riveting, exciting, deeply moving and tremendously powerful work of fiction. Read the rise and fall of Lantier, Maheu, Bonnemort, Deneulin, Catherine, Souvarin and the other comrades, and weep.
Nana (Penguin Classics)
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    		Nana (Penguin Classics)
    Émile Zola
    Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0140442634

    Book Description

    Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was a perfect target for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siecle moral corruption. In this new translation, the fate of Nana--the Helen of Troy of the second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir--is now rendered in racy, stylish English.
    The Belly of Paris (Green Integer)
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      		The Belly of Paris (Green Integer)
      Émile Zola
      Manufacturer: Green Integer
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

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      ASIN: 1933382724

      Book Description

      Little known in this country until its republication by Sun & Moon Press, <em>The Belly of Paris</em> is one of Emile Zola's most fascinating and exciting novels-a book of culinary treats. </p>

      Translated by Zola's original English publisher, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly.</p>
      The Masterpiece (Oxford World's Classics)
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        		The Masterpiece (Oxford World's Classics)
        Émile Zola , and Roger Pearson
        Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

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        ASIN: 0192839632

        Book Description

        The Masterpiece is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a unique insight into his career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.
        The Ladies' Paradise (Oxford World's Classics)
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          		The Ladies' Paradise (Oxford World's Classics)
          Émile Zola
          Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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          Binding: Paperback

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          ASIN: 0192836021

          Book Description

          The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the spectacular development of the modern department store in late nineteenth century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century. Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified. This new translation of the eleventh book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola's greatest novels of the modern city.
          L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop) (Penguin Classics)
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            		L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop) (Penguin Classics)
            Émile Zola
            Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
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            ASIN: 0140447539
            Release Date: 2001-04-03

            Book Description

            Not realism, but filth; not crudity, but pornography, is how one contemporary critic described L'Assommoir. The seventh novel in Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, it is Zola's monumental natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. The story of a good-hearted, but weak-willed and vulnerable laundress, L'Assommoir is widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece and was an immediate sensation, selling 50,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1877. This edition includes Zola's response to critics who denounced his work as immoral.

            Written in gritty street language and unflinchingly portraying the darker side of French culture and society, L'Assommoir transcends Zola's stated intention to expose the powerful effects of heredity and environment on the human condition and, as Robin Buss writes in his Introduction, is marvelous, warm and human...with a tragic heroine who is among the most touching and credible creations in all the literature of the nineteenth century.
            The Conquest of Plassans (Rougon-Macquart)
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              		The Conquest of Plassans (Rougon-Macquart)
              Émile Zola
              Manufacturer: Mondial
              ProductGroup: Book
              Binding: Paperback

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              ASIN: 1595690484
              The Dreyfus Affair: "J`Accuse" and Other Writings
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                The Joy of Life (Rougon-Macquart)
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                  		The Joy of Life (Rougon-Macquart)
                  Émile Zola
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                  Pauline Quenu, the daughter of shopkeepers in the Parisian business district Les Halles (see The Fat and the Thin, aka The Belly of Paris), is taken in by relatives on the coast of Normandy following the death of her parents. There, Pauline - kind and open-minded - is confronted with a gout-plagued host, his avaricious wife, and their lazy son, a morbid hypochondriac, whom she is expected to marry. While the family takes advantage of Pauline, using up the inheritance her parents left to her, Pauline is gradually transformed into a dejected and resigned young woman. Death and accident soon hang over the small house on the Norman coast...
                  Au Bonheur DES Dames (Garnier-Flammarion)
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                    		Au Bonheur DES Dames (Garnier-Flammarion)
                    Emile Zola
                    Manufacturer: Editions Flammarion
                    ProductGroup: Book
                    Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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                    ASIN: 2080702394

                    Authors:

                    1. Zoss, Roland
                    2. Zuehlke, Mark
                    3. Zukav, Gary
                    4. Zukofsky, Louis
                    5. Zachary, Hugh
                    6. Zahn, Timothy
                    7. Zamyatin, Yevgeny
                    8. Zeidner, Lisa
                    9. Zelazny, Roger
                    10. Zeman, Ludmila

                    Authors

                    Authors