Mark Twain mentioned this book in a collection of shorts and random musings. He characterized it as a work that would not stand translation into english with out the extensive use of blanks. That interested me.

This book specifically deals with Swiss contributions to Manitoba. The author, E.H. Bovay, has done some excellent research. Especially strong is his background on the Red River Colony from 1813-1826 as well as his background on the Swiss boy artist, Peter Rindisbacher, who lived in that colony from 1821-1826 and is most often referred to as the "First Artist of Western Canada". Although resembling more a "coffee table" book, it has a surprisingly high level of academic background along with the wonderful reproductions of some of Peter Rindisbacher's finest paintings.

This really is an excellent book. It doesn't get the play of some of Zola's other works but it is an excellent view of the food markets and the people who work in and around this very small section of Paris. It is a sometimes sad and sometimes comical view of the shortcomings of everyday working people - just as true today as when it was written. I found myself mapping the actions of the central characters to people I had encountered through the years. If you read it I promise you'll find that you have met these people in your life as I had in mine. It's lighter that Zola's other work but just as real. Enjoy!

Set in the heroic golden age of nineteenth century capitalism, this belated sequel to the second book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, "La Curée", tells you in Zola's inimitable style about how the stock market works and the psychology of market players. Nothing has really changed since it was written over a hundred years ago. Read it and you may avoid losing your life savings in some scam or other, or you may find some ideas for a scam of your own. You would not be the first, if some recent scandals are anything to go by. If you're Jewish you may not like some of the remarks made by the book's main character, Aristide, but remember Zola's honourable role in the Dreyfus affair only a few years later. Now go and check the stability of your bank while you've still got the chance.

Monsieur Lecoq stumbles upon the case that will make his career, if he is able to expose the identity of a murderer whose intelligence and savoir faire exceeds that of his pursuers. A fledgling police officer with high aspirations, Lecoq struggles with rivalry and jealously within the police force as well as his own inexperience. Unlike much early detective fiction, this novel shows its sleuth in his humble beginnings, dramatizing the making of the detective. Lecoq's criminal past and status as policeman make him an interesting detective figure. Although the novel is a little lengthy, the pace is energetic. The twists and turns of the plot and the foibles of Lecoq and his assistant keep the reader engaged. Those who enjoy classic detective fiction and a good plot (and don't mind a lengthy read without closure), and who are interested in the stories that influenced writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, will appreciate this early work.

This book absolutely surprised me. It is like reading three or four books in one. In the beginning Nicolas writes about the characters as children. The story is told in such a way that you can actually feel the emotions of the characters. As the book progresses, many new characters are introduced. Some are sinister, but most are charming. At one point in the story there is a very touching romance that honestly brought tears to my eyes. It truly shows the sensitivity of the author. I don't think that anyone who reads this book will be disappointed.

A much underrated work of Zola's, this book is a fascinating mixture of steamy sex and high finance, worthy of the best TV soap operas. It gives you all the tricks of insider dealing and how to take the risk out of real estate speculation. All this against the backdrop of the building of the modern Paris, the "City of Lights" we admire so much today. This is the world of "get-rich-quick" with a vengeance. Also possibly the first recorded use of a bearskin rug for illicit sex (between teenage son and father's second wife). A big improvement on Zola's first book, it deserves to be much better known than it is. A must for everyone who wants to be upwardly mobile.

TRUTH is Emile Zola's last novel and was published after his death. It is his longest book and deals with the transformative power of Truth, Justice, and Love. It also deals with how social change happens slowly through generational change rather than by changing
the minds of individuals. It is the story of a teacher in a small French town fighting to prove the innocence of his fellow teacher, a Jew, who is accused of killing a child. The defenders of the teacher have to fight anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church, the government, and the press. Written after Zola's return from exile in England for his part in the Dreyfus Affair, the book draws much of its plot from his experiences fighting anti-Semitism. It is a powerful work that shows how anti-Semitism was used by the different factions in 19th CenturyFrance for their own ends.

This is Zola's third anti-clerical work and his strongest. The first two are LOURDES and ROME which deal with a priest's growing disillusion with his church. In TRUTH, the teacher knows that the real murderer is a Christian brother in the local Catholic school who is protected by the local priests. He has to expose the corruption in the church to prove the innocence of his friend. This plot has special relevance to Americans today who are struggling with stories of priests who molested young boys and a Catholic church that protected the priests rather than the children. In the preface written a hundred years ago, the translator states that this abuse by a cleric of a young boy "is not to be regarded as altogether exceptional" since many such crimes are hushed up by friends in the church.

The structure of the novel is well thought out and is composed of four books of four chapters each. Although narrated in the third person, the book is mostly told from the point of view of the teacher. This lack of objectivity is the weakest part of the novel because we only get to see the teacher's opponents through his limited and biased view. The book is Utopian in style with Truth conquering deceit and leading to a more perfect social structure.

This is a lively, well-written biography of Emile Zola which I found a pleasure to read, albeit a long one! I felt that the author got the balance right: that is, the balance between descriptions of Zola's domestic life, his friendships, his social and political interests, his working methods and his novels. For a large part of this book, Brown uses the Rougon-Macquart series of novels as temporal stepping-stones, which seemed logical to me given the fact that they dominated Zola's creative life as a novelist.

Zola lived in turbulent times. France faced profound social and political divisions and faced major upheavals - war, labour unrest, government instability, state repression, challenges to the rôle of the Catholic Church, and anti-Semitism to name but a few. Yet France was also producing an extraordinary flowering of culture: Zola counted Cézanne, de Maupassant, and Manet (to name but a few) as his friends. Brown describes these contexts well - Zola was so interested in and engaged with his world, it's impossible to appreciate his work fully without that background: for example, the contemporary controversy over many of the novels in the Rougon-Macquart series was due to the fact that although they were set in the Second Empire, they raised uncomfortable issues for readers living in the Third Republic. Brown also does a decent job of summarising the Dreyfus Case - not easy given the complexity of the matter and the fact that it has been the subject of books in its own right.

I found that Zola's work is of mixed quality. Certainly before "L'Assommoir", but after it, I thought that some of the Rougon-Macquart novels were real duds. Brown accepts that the success of "L'Assommoir" stimulated interest in Zola's earlier novels, but perhaps was not as critical as he could have been, even though I realise that it's unrealistic to expect an author to produce works of such importance as "Germinal" on a consistent basis, and that there might be an argument that autobiographer's main job is to relate the life of his subject rather than engage in a sustained analysis of each of his works.

G Rodgers

Zola is a great author and any of his stuff is worth reading. This book breaks new ground in its portrayal of the lives of the "little people" of Paris, its detailed descriptions of food and, most of all, its use of a city district - rather than human beings - as its main character. Zola himself had great affection for it. You feel his nostalgia for his difficult early days in the capital. But ultimately the book doesn't quite gell. The famous descriptions, while being jewels in themselves, actually get in the way of the action. The plot could have been more sharply focused and, perhaps the most curious thing of all, the main human character, Florent, is only a member by marriage of the Rougon-Macquart family which the cycle of novels is about. The "real" member of the family, Lisa, has a remarkably peripheral role. Also, the book could have been made a lot shorter. But it is still rewarding for the reader because, after dealing with provincial intrigue and the capital's fat cats in his first two novels, Zola takes his first stab at portraying the people that were ultimately to make his reputation: the "lower orders".

The plot for the "Belly" is excellent for those who appreciate Zola's subtle twists of fates and corruptible society. Many books by Zola have been amply translated with little lost of the style incorporated by Zola. However, in painting the markets of Paris, Zola incorporates a style similar to literary landscaping utilized by James F. Cooper (highly detailed). The translation does not flow as an artist brush on a canvas, it becomes tedious at times leaving me to skim over rather quickly, which is rare. Overall, it was worth reading, but not worth going to pains to get to it.

This novel ties the main character Flaurent with the Rougon-Macquart family through marriage of his half brother. Flaurent is a runaway convict, who lives in his half brother's shop, which is a part of the big Parisian market. Flaurent is a former school teacher, who had had no interest in politics, but once, during the coup d'etat in December of 1851, while walking along the street came under police fire and had his hands smudged in dead woman's blood. That is how he got sentenced to hard labor. There is a sharp contrast between him and most of the other characters in the novel...

The novel is somewhat draggy at times and gossips with squabbles take up lots of passages, but one must bear in mind that in the Rougon-Macquart epic Zola was trying to create the broadest possible picture of the French society under Napoleon III. That is why, besides the Parisian market, the epic narrates about: big shops defeating the small ones ("Au Bonheur des dames/Ladies Paradise"), miners ("Germinal"), a stock exchange ("Argent/Money"), etc.

Florent is singled out from noisy political intriguers, contrasted with calculated selfishness of shop-keepers, but at the same time he is not envisioned as a real force, which is capable of producing major changes in the society. In fact, of all the characters spread throughout twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, it is hard to name those that would be able to take place equal to the best characters of Zola's predecessors, such as Balzac, Flaubert. Even the best characters in the Rougon-Macquart cycle have something in them, which is cold and dry, monotonous and preconceived, which prevents them from becoming such classic literary figures as Father Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Emma Bovary.

This novel also points out that heredity may not always play that big of a role. Neither from any of the Rougon-Macquart novels, nor from the family tree, included in the novel "Doctor Pascal", nor from the comments of Doctor Pascal himself can we learn how such phlegmatic and mercenary people as Lisa Quenu and her husband are in this novel, could produce such a joyous, generous and selfless daughter Pauline, as we are later to find out from the novel "Joie de vivre/Zest for Life". Secondly, Lisa Quenu together with her sister Gervaise ("l'Assomommoir/the Dram Shop") never get in any contact with their brother Jean Macquart ("la Terre/the Earth", "la Debacle/the Downfall") and all throughout the series Lisa Quenu's nephew Claude Lantier - he appears in this novel and later in "L'Ouvre/the Masterpiece" - and his other two brothers are totally alien to each other and to their parents.