About this title: Zola's depiction of the life of the laboring classes, and the struggle between capital and the workers in the mines of northern France, is an epic of naturalism that also possesses the richness and exactitude of a sociological document.
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner, New York
Date Published: 1951
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. xxx, 539 p. 18 cm. At head of title: Les Rougon-Macquart...In French. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780451519757ISBN:0451519752
Description: Good. 0451519752 Mass market paperback, previously read used book in good condition, varying degrees of shelf wear, some spine creases, m..._ read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1970
ISBN-13:9780451519757ISBN:0451519752
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Description: Good. Good Condition. Reasonable wear-still very useable. Text appears free of marks, writing, and highlighting. May have bookstore-related stamps/stickers/marks. Multiple copies may be available. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. Fast, personal service. No hassle, full refund return policy! COMBINE SHIPPING-TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER BOOKS/CDs/MOVIES AVAILABLE! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Berlin: Verlag Von Th. Knaur Nac
Description: Acceptable. ---Hard Cover. Fair/No Jacket. No Date. 12mo-over 6 3/4"-7 3/4" tall. 413pages. Interior-near-flawless condition w/ moderate foxing on the outside of the text block. The dark grey boards have light-to-mo derate surface and edge wear. The outer orange spine is completely missing, and the remaining part of the orange, leather spine (near the front/back gutters) has a moderate-to-significant amount of we ar. -Publish Place: -Size: read more
Description: Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes-in pen or highlighter-but the notes cannot obscure the text. ******PLEASE NOTE****** Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas unless you select EXPEDITED shipping! Thank you & Happy Holidays! read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Fair. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1970
ISBN-13:9780451519757ISBN:0451519752
Description: Acceptable. MAY HAVE COVER WEAR, SPINE CREASES, HIGHLIGHTING, UNDERLINING & PAGES YELLOWED FROM AGE. FASTER SERVICE FROM US! ! ! read more
"Germinal, generally considered to be Zola's masterpiece, is a gripping novel set in the fictional French coal-mining town of Montsou during the 1860s. The inhabitants of Montsou are a resigned lot--resigned to their livelihood in spite of its dangers, resigned to their poverty, and resigned to the bestiality of their lives. Zola's frank descriptions of the promiscuity and vulgarity that attend day-to-day existence in Montsou are a key to establishing the gritty atmosphere maintained throughout. Into this milieu comes Étienne, a well-meaning, idealistic, but ultimately naïve young man just recently dismissed from his job on the railway. It is Étienne, with his elaborate theories of justice for the working man are taken from his reading of leading socialist thinkers, who inspires the miners of Montsou to embark on a general strike.
Zola's vivid description of this prolonged work stoppage, and the increasing poverty, starvation, despair, and ultimately violence that attend it, is the centerpiece of the novel. As the chapters pass, Zola astonishes the reader with the overwhelming weight of despair that overtakes the lives of his characters. Their sufferings, undertaken in the cause of justice for themselves and their fellow miners, give them the zeal of martyrdom (a comparison Zola explicity makes on several occasions). It is a zeal which ultimately robs them of such humanity as had been left to them by the pre-existing conditions of their lives. Much like the idealism of the Revolution descending into the bloodletting of the Terror, the strikers, initially demanding only justice, end as murderous thugs. Étienne finds himself divided between being caught up in their zeal and being horrified by what he has helped to create, and the "oppressors"--the bourgeois managers and their families--gain the reader's sympathies.
The novel is ultimately ambivalent about the "great cause" of socialism. Étienne himself, as noted before, is basically a naïve dilettante, but he is also a man of decidedly mixed motives--he has visions of himself escaping the anonymity of working-class existence and finding fame, and even material fortune, as an orator and champion of the cause. He is contrasted throughout the novel with Souvarine, an engineer of anarchist convictions. While Étienne is a true believer in the utopian dream, Souvarine is a nihilist who sees nothing but destruction and chaos as the harvest to come. The act of terrorism which sets in motion the novel's horrific climax is the working out of this nihilist vision.
The weaknesses of the novel are primarily the result of Zola's commitment to his highly theoretical view of human life. The novel illustrates his deterministic understanding of moral development: His characters are what their environment makes them (the debased and subhuman conditions of life in Montsou leading to the bestial behavior of the villagers), or what they are programmed to be by genetics (the animal lurking within Étienne due to his family history of alcoholism). The characters, while usually engaging as persons and well-drawn, occasionally become two-dimensional respresentations of Zola's theoretical preoccupations."
"Emile Zola, is THE naturalist novelist of France. Naturalism means that he probes the most unpleasant, dificult and sometimes disgusting aspects of French society in the mid- to late 19th century. In his long, intertwined series of novels on various members of the Rougon-Marquart families, Zola analyzes the long-term effects of mental discrubances on one family and alcoholism on the other. As an aside, Zola was a courageous humanitarian as seen in his stand against anti-semitism and his defense of unjustly accused and imprisoned French Army colonel Alfred Dreyfuss, c. 1895-1906. In the vein of Stendhal and Flaubert, Zola is not the easiest writer to read in the original French. I have to admit to cheating a little and reading both Germinal and Nana in English translation. However, thanks to a skilled translator, Zola's crisp, smooth style, rich in detail and humanitarian emotions, comes through beautifully. The title of this novel--Germinal--comes from the short-lived (about 1793-99) French Revolutionary calendar, and refers to a few weeks in spring--i.e., the month of germination. The germination in this novel is a metaphor for the new, yet untested, concept of the labor union as a way for workers to lobby for better wages and working conditions. Wages and conditions are dreadful for the coal miners of northern central France in the 1860s. DUring a period of unprecedented propsperity under Napoleon III's Second Empire, the miners and their families are barely thriving on bits of food and sbustandard lodging. The powers-that-be ignore their demands for increased wages because, after all, the company provides them with free (dilapidated) lodgings. Furthermore, the miners, who work long hours underground, in dirty, dangerous conditions, are paid by the amount of coal they hew out of the mines each day. They also must do their own timbering, that is, shore up the mine caverns, with lumber to make them safer. But good timbering takes time and that means less time to hew, less coal, and less money, so the miners tend to do a hurried job of timbering so they can get to the coal, and hurried timbering means a potentially dnagerous mine . . . and you can see where this is going in terms of cave-ins, injuries, and deaths. Into this milieu comes an optimistic young newcomer, Etienne (this novel's representatvie of Zola's Rougon-Marquart family) who proposes an organization of solidarity to help the miners improve their conditions. But such unions take preparation--months or years of saving up funds to tide workers opver during long strikes and other contingencies. These miners have noo such preparetion and when the strike begins, they literally begin to starve. The other usual consequences--scabs, crime, violence, illiness,--all add up to tragedy and a high body count that is relentless. Zola, nonetheless, manages to suffuse such inhuman conditions with a beatuiful sense of humanityh as seen through the members of the Maheu family, who are victims iin so manyh tragic ways, they remain loving and surprisingly normal. The novel is in no way upbeat, but it certainly makes its point about povery, injustice, and out-of-control capitalism as well as the glaring gap between the haves and the have-nots. The film version, starring Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou as Maheu his wife is amazing, and although somewhat truncated from the original novel, does beautiful cinemagraphic justice to a literary masterpiece."
"Although I found this book pretty captivating, I think I probably felt differently about the characters than I was expected to. Etienne in the end strikes me as heartless, narcissistic, and some other word that I can't think of right now that basically means "ambitious to the point of using those close to him in order to get to where he wants to be." I don't know if it was supposed to be ironic that he yearned to be just like the bourgeois that he was fighting, and pontificated about how he would one day be the leader of all these poor souls once the revolution came. I guess that just goes to show you why communism/socialism can't work, because someone always wants to be the leader.
I felt like it was a typical depiction of revolution-gone-wrong, a-la A Tale of Two Cities, and it illustrated both sides of the struggle, albeit heavily weighted toward the workers. Still, I felt some sympathy for some of the bourgeois characters, although I'm not sure I was supposed to. Overall it was a sad depiction of the vicious cycle of being poor, and a lot of the points Zola makes are still very valid today, especially the idea of sex and promiscuity as an escape from misery, which only begets more mouths to feed and therefore more poverty, and the idea that when you are able to make just enough money to feed and clothe your family, the slightest slip-up can send you spiraling into endless debt. And maybe the character of Etienne is also a nod to the mixed feelings within the economically depressed classes - in the one sense you want to help them, and in another sense they can frustrate you to no end with their ignorance. Now everyone's going to think I'm a republican.
So overall I thought this book was incredibly interesting, I just couldn't quite get into Etienne as the protagonist."
"Emile Zola's Germinal is an inspirational twentieth century classic that addresses how man is driven by his innate will of survival to break the shackles of poverty and class. The story highlights the life of Etienne, a French mechanic who upon entering a mining community in search of work witnesses the human suffering and injustices that inspires him to shed his shell of peasantry and rise a revolutionary who envisions a perfect world in which socialism provides order for mankind. Though the insightful young man tragically fails to accomplish his goals through his protests and increasingly fervent demonstrations because the mistrust and turmoil among the miners shatter any hopes of unity. The failure of Etienne reflects the ruinous nature of humanity."
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