5.
GERMINAL
It's a very cold, early spring morning in about 1867 when 21-year-old Etienne, a mechanic who lost his job in the south for slugging a foreman, chances into a coal mining job in the north of France. He soon learns the ways of the poor mining families of Montsou, especially the children of Maheu, with whom he lives for a while, and the 15-year-old daughter Catharine, who becomes the subject of a bristling romantic rivalry between Etienne and another young miner, Chaval.
Able to read and possessed of a little education, Etienne naturally wants to help the miners better their situation, and he is swayed by a traveling union organizer as well as retired miners who run the local shops. But the more he rises in the organization, the more he is torn between his sympathy for his fellow workers and a desire to get beyond their dirty, dangerous life.
Zola's 1885 novel is the 13th in a great series of 20 books that covered the multiple lives of several French families over many decades, and this was one of the best. It details the working conditions in a mile-deep coal mine, the grinding poverty of the workers, the various levels of bourgeois managers and owners above them. Germinal was surprisingly frank about the sexual mores of the rural people of the time, as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR : Emile Zola was a French journalist and novelist known for his series of 20 novels known collectively as Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93). Zola's style was called literary naturalism; his novels were attacked and even banned for their frankness and sordid detail, and caused quite a bit of controversy in their day. The same traits made him a best-selling author and a star of French literature in his day. In 1898 he then further incurred the wrath of French officials when he published the open letter "J'Accuse," in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, an Army officer who had been convicted of treason. Zola was sentenced to prison for libel, fled to England, and was granted amnesty a few months later. He died in Paris from carbon monoxide poisoning.
It's a very cold, early spring morning in about 1867 when 21-year-old Etienne, a mechanic who lost his job in the south for slugging a foreman, chances into a coal mining job in the north of France. He soon learns the ways of the poor mining families of Montsou, especially the children of Maheu, with whom he lives for a while, and the 15-year-old daughter Catharine, who becomes the subject of a bristling romantic rivalry between Etienne and another young miner, Chaval.
Able to read and possessed of a little education, Etienne naturally wants to help the miners better their situation, and he is swayed by a traveling union organizer as well as retired miners who run the local shops. But the more he rises in the organization, the more he is torn between his sympathy for his fellow workers and a desire to get beyond their dirty, dangerous life.
Zola's 1885 novel is the 13th in a great series of 20 books that covered the multiple lives of several French families over many decades, and this was one of the best. It details the working conditions in a mile-deep coal mine, the grinding poverty of the workers, the various levels of bourgeois managers and owners above them. Germinal was surprisingly frank about the sexual mores of the rural people of the time, as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR : Emile Zola was a French journalist and novelist known for his series of 20 novels known collectively as Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93). Zola's style was called literary naturalism; his novels were attacked and even banned for their frankness and sordid detail, and caused quite a bit of controversy in their day. The same traits made him a best-selling author and a star of French literature in his day. In 1898 he then further incurred the wrath of French officials when he published the open letter "J'Accuse," in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, an Army officer who had been convicted of treason. Zola was sentenced to prison for libel, fled to England, and was granted amnesty a few months later. He died in Paris from carbon monoxide poisoning.