This is by far one of the best books I've ever read. Zola's ability to demonstrate the dark side in human beings is absolutely spectacular. If you are too read one of his works, it should be this one.

A great book full of heartwrenching mellodrama. Greed and incest rear their ugly heads before the backdrop of Haussman's transformation of Paris in the mid 19th century. There is hardly a dull moment in this masterpiece. I have yet to read more of Zola, but you can bet I've got two other books by him waiting on my shelf. The story follows an opportunistic provincial descendant of the Roujon family as he makes his fortune in Paris. He heartlessly leaves his first wife to die as he makes arrangements for his second marriage- to a wealthy young woman half his age. Renee's spirit, already dimmed by a savage rape by a family member is only tarnished all the more in her extravagant new lifestyle under the negligent eye of the specuating schemester, Rougon. She falls madly in love with her efeminate stepson and seals her ruin which concides with the burst of the speculative bubble in Paris real estate. This review was based on the original French text

Zola's literary terrain was the victim with no voice, the laborers, those that made civilization run at great human cost. In "Pot- Bouille", (Boiling Pot), Zola has taken on the middle class residents of an apartment building and savages their collective pretensions of moral superiority. The stink of petty economies, money lust and aristocratic yearing is everywhere. His hero is Octave Mouret a young cloth merchant from the provinces who comes to 1860s Paris to make his fortune. In this residential building whose public areas are overdone with architectural garnish Mouret makes his home among an unhealthy bunch of souls. There are voracious mothers trying to marry off lackluster, shallow daughters, philandering husbands, besieged, toiling husbands, cold indifferent wives, callous mistresses. The servants are stored away for the night in their garret rooms after a day of being subjected to the customary regimen of abuse and bullying dished up by their employers. That the servants are a crude, ignorant crowd makes them no more worthy of respect than their masters. In the parallel world of house help slop bucket throwing, vulgar gossip, same sex seduction and infant death figures prominently. On the quest to conquer big, bad Paris Mouret helps himself heartily to all this messy stew offers whether neighbors' wives or solitary widows. He tastes whatever his manipulations bring his way. Women are a banquet fit for the taking if they can be emotionally and physically overpowered, so says the masculine imperative of the times. But then the female characters here have little to admire. The women represent a menu of every sort of female vice, wallowing in vanity, indolence and self-complacency served up in heaping portions. There is so much tragedy in this house that the horrors of greed and duplicity become almost farcical in Zola's hands. On these pages we live through a years worth of Jerry Springer moments top hats and crinoline hoop skirts flying in contentious free-for-all. "Pot- Bouille" is a feast of poisonous family values to be savored comfortably by the modern reader from the vantage point of a new (more humanist?) millennium.

This book, number five in the Rougon-Macquart saga and the sequel to "The Conquest Of Plassans", is really quite unique in French literature. In a way, you could say it's a forerunner of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the sexes reversed. A young and very devoted priest is nursed back to health after illness and has his sensual passions aroused in a big way by a teenage girl living virtually alone in a huge, century-old abandoned walled garden. Add to this a fire-and-brimstone friar, an intellectually-challenged younger sister, a kindly doctor of an uncle and the earthy animal spirits of southern French country life as a background to it all and you have something special, even if the final outcome of the love affair is unbelievable. Full of poetry, passion, symbolism and Zola's usual intoxicating powers of description, but not the book you'll find serialized in your local church magazine. Well worth reading as it shows that Zola's craft as a writer has fully matured but he has yet to find the subject to hit the big time sales-wise.

"L'assommoir" is undoubtedly a powerful and moving book, yet, as a non French speaker who has just finished reading the Penquin translation by Leonard Tancock, I'm left feeling slightly frustrated. Anyone who has read the extraordinary "Germinal" cannot blame Zola for this; afterall, "L'assommoir is considererd to be one of the finest of the Rougon-Macquart cycle. No, it is to this English translator that we must turn to for answers. How is it that a book famous for it's uncompromising and brutal dialogue, is here, almost bereft of the very language that Zola thought so essential? This emasculated and dishonest translation made in 1970 may well suit those who are squeamish, or, of a nervous disposition, but, if you are hoping to catch the real voice of Gervaise and the voices of those with whom she shares her tragic life, it may well be advisable to listen elsewhere.

This is a story of poverty. It explores the life of a family who cannot escape from wretchedness. The fault is both in themselves and society. L'Assommoir is at the apex of social novels. It describes the hardships and expectations of persons scarcely able to feed themselves. During the course of the book Zola addresses these and other social issues: domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism, infidelity, prostitution, and selfishness. Zola also discusses the childhood of Nana. But the Book, Nana, is virtually independent of L'Assomoir.

Zola shows his power to tug at the heart strings. The novel is written with tremendous depth of subject matter and is a quick read.

One of the reviewers below wrote that it is a prohibitionist novel. I disagree with this perspective. The book is not against all uses of alcohol; rather, it is against the abuse of alcohol.

One need go no further than the title of the book, dervied from the French verb "assommer"- to beat down, to understand that this will be a brutally and painfully realistic work. Zola is true to this expectation. Emile Zola had a thunderous impact on both nineteenth century French literature and political culture. Not only did he decry blatant injustice through his works, but to a large extent, he sacrificed his livelihood in espousing the cause of Captain Dreyfus through his tract "J'accuse!". Zola's sincere moral beliefs will surprise no one who has read his works. The passion with which the novels that comprise the Rougon series are written is a rarity. Having read five or six of these novels, I find that the charcter of Gervaise in L'Assomoir is both the most real and the most endearing. As opposed to Nana who is often perceived by readers as cold and merciless, Gervaise is a simple, hard-working woman who suffers a tourmented life. Zola's classic naturalist descriptions of the bars and the consumption of absinthe are priceless. In fact, Gervaise's suffering almost (but not quite)enables us to justify the actions of her daughter Nana in the subsequent book of the series. For anyone who is interested in sampling Zola's mastery and sincere passion, this book is a must read.

Initially, I gave La Bete Humaine five stars, but after some thought downgraded it to four. It's quite good, and in parts downright spectacular, but in all honesty it doesn't rank on the same level as the monolithic L'Assommoir, Germinal and Nana. The problem lies with the premise. In the three aforementioned novels, the characters were all basically ordinary people. This made it easy to be pulled into their emotional struggles, and made for unspeakably captivating reading because it was so easy to see how _real_ and _human_ they were. I stood behind L'Assommoir's Gervaise all the way, _literally loudly yelling_ as I accompanied her to L'Assommoir's inevitable conclusion.

I did not have the same reaction in La Bete Humaine. The protagonist is an "ordinary person," except he's afflicted with a mental disorder that makes him want to kill women. And thus, all his character development works to develop that one unfortunate aspect of his personality. I could not get inside his head. I could not see reality in his emotional struggle. To be frank, his moral dilemmas seemed very much invented by Zola, as opposed to taken from life. Admittedly, they were very elaborate inventions and _still_ made for captivating reading - that's why I'm still giving it four stars. Gervaise is a real character. Jacques Lantier is a writer's invention.

I would, however, deem it necessary for you to read La Bete Humaine, if only for one scene - the train wreck. That is one of Zola's most powerful scenes ever. It is really quite amazing. As I read, I saw and heard it happen, and I rallied behind the people that courageously stood up to the catastrophe just like I rallied behind Gervaise in L'Assommoir. It needs to be read to be believed. But the rest, I'm not too thrilled with in the end, and I didn't walk away carrying an image of any character from the book in my brain for days like I did after reading L'Assommoir, Germinal and Nana. So four stars it is. La Bete Humaine is a worthy member of the Rougon-Macquart series, and deserving of your time, but falls just short of greatness.

Plenty of adultery and murders in this book, but not gory. It is an entertaining story and after it's all said and done, isn't that what we are doing this for? It is not one of my favorite of zola's rougon-macquart series but it is still good. This is the story of homicidal woman hater Jaques Latiner, son of Gervaise (L'assomoir) and brother to Nana Coupeau (nana) Claude Latiner (the masterpiece) and a coal miner dude in one of his books I have yet to read (germinal)

This is one of Zola's most violent and disturbing novels, but it possesses a kind of "tragic grandeur," to quote the translator, which makes it story and its characters live on in the mind long after the reader has turned the last page. Part crime thriller and partly a novel of railway life, it tells the story of a group of people who are slaves to their passions and whose ultimate doom is preordained by their backgrounds and temperaments. There are marvellous passages of descriptive writing and if you think that a novel about the railways is bound to be dull you will find yourself happily mistaken. The depiction of Jacques, genetically doomed to be a murderer, is more frightening than any Hannibal Lecter. Some modern readers may have difficulty empathising with Zola's ideological beliefs, but in the end the novel carries all before it. A shattering, truly memorable work of art, very well translated.

An entertaining read but you can't help learn something about Parisian bourgeois class homelife in the process. Plenty of intrigues and double dealings. I like how zola lets us eavesdrop on the gossip sessions of the servants in the back courtyard in order to move the plot along. The ending leaves the reader hanging somewhat. He was obiously already planning to write the next installment in the Rougon Macquart series (and this book's sequel) The ladies paradise.

A good jolly soap opera of a book. Young man comes from the provinces to the capital. Gets a room in an apartment block. Learns about life in general and the opposite sex in particular. Nothing new so far. Other authors had already trod the same path. Here, the whole process is meticulously described with Zola's usual skill (he is now on the tenth novel in his cycle). One cannot help thinking, though, that the apartment block must have been a pox doctor's paradise. But the book's real interest is in how the hero uses his acquired knowledge - which is revealed when he becomes the great retailing tycoon in the next book "Au Bonheur des Dames". So, this book is really the first part of a two-part series and it does its job of whetting the appetite for part two. It shows that the university of life is better than a business studies course any day.

"Pot Bouille" is indeed a piece of treasure. Even now, I can still find myself holding on to each word since the very first page. Each page will keep you wanting for more. It tells a story of an apartment building and its occupants. One might imagine the type of brownstone mansions in New York City or Beacon Hill in Boston divided to apartment units to be rented out. Except that in Zola's pot, neighborly interactions take place regularly and make up the heart of the story.

Although many stories about bourgeoisie lives have been written, I've never come across characters as vivid, comical, harsh, evolving and disgusting as those portrayed in this book. Gossips, money, sex, adulteries, self advancement and selfishness are so well mashed in the pot, they'll warm up to readers' hearts. I can really feel for the characters cause they seem very much alive, it almost seem that I'm living next door to them. Although Monsieur Octave Mouret is described as the hero in this book, I feel that the true hero is Monsieur Josserand. "Pot Bouille" is a story about temptations and human feelings. It has every power to make me cringe, laugh, smile and cry.

"Pot Bouille" is a truly wonderful piece that will spark readers' imaginations. I've enjoyed reading the copy by Oxford World's Classics. Professor Brian Nelson has done a terrific job in translating it from its original French. Read it and have fun!!!!

As the back cover of the book says, Nana by Emile Zola is the story of a woman of very low birth who uses her beauty to conquer the high society men of Paris on her way to becoming a courtesan of immense power and attraction. Nana takes place during the final days of the Second Empire of Napoleon III and actually ends with the event that would herald the downfall of the empire: the declaration of war against Prussia.

Zola is considered the leading member of the naturalist group of writers. Naturalists are concerned with real worldliness. They wish to portray a sense of what life is really like for their characters. They tend more to concentrate on the type of character that they are writing about instead of the character's uniqueness. As such, Nana becomes a story more about courtesans from lowly births than it is about Nana.

Naturalist writing also tends to lend itself to subjects of societal ills and debauchery. Naturalists seek to show the world in all its filth and depravity. To do this they must go where one finds this stuff: in the gutters.

Unfortunately, in his attempt to portray the character types one finds in the company of someone like Nana, Zola has created more caricatures than characters. Few of the characters in Nana where credible participants. Nana herself is unlike anyone you would find in sane society and seems more like an amalgam of various real world influences than a person of one mind.

The male characters of Nana were particularly egregious examples of overzealousness by Zola. The Comte Muffat is Nana's primary benefactor throughout the story. He withstands great hardships and torments from Nana with nary a protest. This may have been believeable if only Muffat had been the victim of Nana's capriciousness; but, she strings along many more men in this manner, robbing them of their dignity and fortunes without so much as a whimper from them.

Nana is compared to a golden fly who rises from the dung heap to taint the high society Parisian world that she invades with her low birth debauchery and sin. Nana may be a metaphor for the overall breakdown of French society which preceded the collapse of the Second Empire; but, Zola would have done better to lay it on less thick. Nana could have been an excellent statement on the necessity of retaining a moral backbone to maintain the fabric of society. Instead, it reads like a cheap nineteenth century soap opera played out with exaggerated, unreal characters.

No drugs, no rock 'n' roll but plenty of sex. Great entertainment in itself, this book is best read as a sequel to "L'Assommoir" whose tragic downtrodden heroine can be said, in a way, to have got her revenge on society through her daughter, Nana. You might say it's a case of the underclass striking back and one wonders how today's acting and modelling scene compares with Second Empire Paris. Someone once said that every woman is sitting on a gold mine and Nana certainly proves it. Trouble is, she also proves the old saying "easy come, easy go". What would have happened if she'd been inoculated against smallpox?

Emile Zola is credited to have written the first "modern" French novels, that is to say, novels about contemporary subject matter and society, written in a natural style, which is why he is called a Naturalist writer. He was a very observant man, with an eye for detail and realistic dialogue and scenarios. He was a friend of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, who himself was considered to be a modern artist for his photographic style of paintings. Emile Zola's greatest novel has got to be Nana.

Far from the sugary and innocent Gigi story by Gabrielle Colette which would come later, Nana takes place as the French Second Empire comes to a close. From 1852 to 1870, France became a capitalistic Gilded Age, a time in which men and women would stop at nothing to make it into high society. The decadence of the period is captured, as well as the poverty and decaying morals. It would not be long before Emperor Louis Napoleon III lost the Franco Prussian War (1870-1871) and the empire collapsed. Nana is the daughter of a poor laundress- a washer woman from the country. She becomes a courtesan, a high class prostitute with many wealthy and powerful clients. These include financiers and even a count. Nana has an influence over all the men she becomes involved with, and they are smitten by her, offering her homes and material benefits from her ... favors. In the end, Nana becomes a symbol for the ... society of Emile Zola's time. This novel is a good read for fans of Zola's Naturalistic style and should be read prior to his "The Debacle" which deals with the Franco Prussian War.

Nana became the subject for a Manet painting. The book and the painting shocked the stuffy Salon society of Paris, especially because Nana is so blatant in her ...feminine powers over men. But the novel is excellent, a masterpiece of French literature, a critique on the ridiculous level of poverty at the time. Mothers were willing to sell their daughters into prostitution. Nana, however much a hold she has over the men, cannot get the one thing she truly wants- a place in decent French society. She was always seen as a courtesan with no real ladylike qualities. They were wrong. Nana is a great character, and Emile Zola takes us to that time with such precison and power that we are as if in a time machine transported to those French streets and to those brothel bedrooms. He writes without any hold bars. His novels should be made into films. I suggest this reading material for any fan of French writers. If you like Honore De Balzac, Gustav Flaubert and the time period of the Second French Empire, this is your book.

Émile Zola's Germinal is a disheartening account of many people who work in the mines of the town of Montsou in France. In the beginning of this account, a young man called Étienne comes in to Village 240 in Montsou looking for a job that he finds in the Le Voreux coal mine. Here he meets the Maheu family. But during this work of fiction, Étienne becomes an instigator of a strike of the mining workers. This all due to the sneaky wage cut made the Grégoires mining company. The company has changed around the payment to make it look like the workers are getting the same amount of money, but the workers realize that it is a wage cut and end up striking. Almost all of the workers in the mine are already in terrible poverty and it only gets worse.

In the first part of the novel, Zola explains in great detail the condition and appearance of the mines. Also, we hear about the experiences' of the characters in the story, such as Grandpa Bonnemort always coughing up black !saliva. Additionally, we meet Levaque, Pierrones, and Mouque who are fellow miners. In Part Two, we are introduced to the wealthy Grégoire family in great descriptiveness as well as other top executives in the mining company. During Part Three, we meet Souvarine, a Russian who is a violent anarchist who wants to destroy many things. This begins the line of tragedy for the Maheus.

The story begins and ends in the spring; beginning in March and ending in April. These parts all show the germination of the characters in the story. In the beginning, many people were surviving with what they had. Even though the company decreased the wages, it would still be more money than the people made striking. During the 1880s in France, times were hard and things didn't change very quickly. The strike didn't make things any better for the workers; it just made things worse.

Why do we have labor laws? Why do we accept nuclear energy and the oil industry? Why did the rich countries become so prosperous? "Germinal" shows you why. Often considered Zola's greatest work, it is indeed a truly epic story skilfully blended with penetrating political and economic analysis, not least of the mixture of motives that push people to stand up for their rights or those of others. Take John Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath", multiply it by ten or twenty and you won't even come close to this book. Deeply moving, shocking, but ultimately uplifting, for in the wreckage of the miners' crushing defeat after their strike Zola, for once, offers a glimmer of hope. Better to have fought and lost than to have done nothing. The seeds of a new, fairer world have been sown. And one day........

In addition to their renowned pievishness, the French are expert pessimists. Indeed, they have raised pride, scorn, and sarcasm to such high art. But they were also great pioneers, from the political caricatures of Daumier to modernism.

Germinal was one of the first truly excellent muckraker novels, exploring the complex tableau of oppressed workers in early industrial society. THough there is some excessive melodrama in the characters, they open a world that few would be able to know without direct experience. We should never forget how new this was, how much of a pioneer Zola was. It is a huge success.

But the novel also stands very well on its own. The writing is austerely beautiful, textured to feel as dusty and cold as the mines themselves. THere are realistic good guys and bad guys, highly complex characters who enter into difficult fights, who were types that Zola largely invented and that have been copied many many times. On every page, I wanted to find out what would happen to them, how they grew or died, where they were from. I hoped for them, pitied them, and hated them and even wept from them in the climactic ending when a glimmer of humanity transcended the class struggle for just a moment.

I was fascinated and repelled by the world Zola recreates, which has been my reaction to French culture throughout my contact with it for the last 32 years!

I found myself enthralled in this book, and I must credit Zola for his unflinching, often brutal realism. However, the story left me feeling very sad; there was so much blatant inhumanity. The tragic rape scene near the end left me horrified and numb, as did numerous passages throughout. Zola really captures a dark side of life in the country.

The ultimate naturalist novel. It may sound corny, but if ever a book was "earthy", this one certainly is. Many people, including Zola's fellow naturalists, have been disgusted by the scenes of rape, murder and general bad behaviour in it, but in fact none of them are included solely for their shock effect. The characters are all too true to life, and although they may be brutish, they are not all stupid, as is shown in the cafe discussions about the agricultural market and the threat from cheap American grain imports (remember, this is in the 1860s). One of the few Zola books where the member of the Rougon-Macquart family in it is not one of the main characters, and in fact his role in the action is almost accidental. For him, and perhaps for most readers, the farmers are aliens from another world but this book is an excellent work and one of Zola's best, though it may make you think twice about buying that nice little house in the country, especially in France.