une famille centrale sur laquelle agissent au moins deux familles

March 25, 2024 12:33 PM

"You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us. If I had to send you on your way with some minimally sufficient quantity of Zola, let me propose the following, which to me are the greatest examples of Zola’s art..." Brandon Taylor in the LRB, on his two-year project of reviewing Zola's cycle of novels: Is It Even Good?
posted by mittens (12 comments total)

That should be a permanent column in the LRB for critical reevaluations.
posted by rhizome at 12:36 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

I love the scope of Zola's project, and I appreciate both the research he put into his work (forming nearly an 'unpublished ethnography of France') and its conceptual dimension. At the same time, what he says about it is ...

we can easily see that the novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread and the phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.

And I guess in my mind the world has so many variables that I'd expect something a little, I dunno, disjointed, and in Zola's hands it comes out a bit melodramatic? I can't blame him for telling strong, coherent stories though.

Anyway, this article was a great overview, and I'd add the multi-author, single-themed collection Les Soirées de Médan as a useful starting point, because it contains Zola's "The Attack on the Mill," Huysmans's "Sac-au-dos," and Maupassant's "Boule de Suif"--launching the latter's career and giving a perspective on how three well-known and personally-connected authors handled similar themes that Zola expanded on in one of the novels Brandon Taylor recommends.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:01 PM on March 25 [3 favorites]

I have not read Zola but I have a request: do A Dance to the Music of Time next plz
posted by chavenet at 2:18 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

Great article! I can see why he got hung up on The Dream (which is uncharacteristically short for the cycle), because it's actually satire--Zola is ribbing the medievalist tendencies of the French Catholic Revival. L'Assommoir is indeed terrific.
posted by thomas j wise at 2:38 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

I have only read a few of these, but let me just say that The Ladies Paradise is such a pageturner that it can be passed along through your not-exactly-19th-century-French-lit-inclined siblings to gobble it up as a beach book.
posted by thivaia at 3:15 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

I enjoyed Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) well enough, and he deserves credit for “J’Accuse…!”, surely.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:05 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

I had to read La Bête Humaine [the one with the trains] for A-level French the year I arrived in Britain. Our French teacher was excellent; she had a habit of giggling over the sweet romantic moments between Jacques and Sèverine ("...except she's cheating on her murderer husband and he's a serial killer! heeheehehee!")

Just recently, on a 24-hour train journey from London to Italy, I tried vaguely to explain the book to my friend who'd never read Zola. "It's very much he looked at her, she looked at him, a train passed (it was the 7.45 to Le Havre) and then they murdered a bunch of people."

The two moments that stick in my mind are Flore's self-inflicted fate and the last sentence of that chapter; and the book's ending with the driverless train of singing drunken soldiers plunging on into the night.

If you're minded to read La Bête Humaine, CWs include child sexual abuse mentioned, animal death and violence against women. Also, maybe don't read it before (or, god help us, during) a long train journey.
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:38 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

This is all set for a years-long playoffs-style knockout tournament to find the Best Rougon-Macquart novel of them all. (It’s Germinal FWIW)
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:54 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

"My mother once pawned my Nintendo 64 in order to buy more booze." Fuck.
posted by rdc at 8:06 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

"Un jour, ma mère a mis ma Nintendo 64 en gage pour acheter plus d'alcool." Putain.

-Marquis de Sade.

vous ne vous rendez pas compte monsieur Zola, pour le cheval, c'est un aller simple.
posted by clavdivs at 8:36 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

I don't know where to find them at the moment, but the BBC did a very good series of radio plays based on on some of these books, under the general title of "Blood, Sex and Money", with narration by the excellent and much-missed Glenda Jackson.
posted by Fuchsoid at 11:38 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

I love that an appreciation/reappraisal of any 19th century literature ran in the LRB, and that Brandon Taylor wrote it.
He's knowledgeable about and interested in European history-- a pleasant surprise to find someone contemporary interested in long, detailed books. I really liked reading Balzac, Maupassant, and especially Hugo.
posted by lwxxyyzz at 12:45 PM on March 26 [1 favorite]