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| La Bete Humaine (French Edition)
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| Look-a-here, people, listen to me, you don't want to be a (French railway) bourgeoisieThis novel seems more pulp railway fiction than anything else--the sort of stuff you used to see on drugstore magazine racks back in the 1950s. In any event, Zola's novel centers around a French railway company with some seriously dysfunctional employees.
Zola's railway employs (1) an engine driver who is also an potential serial killer, (2) a deputy station-master who is a revenge killer, (3) a crossing-guard, who is a mass murderer/train wrecker and (4) a signals maintainer who is also wife poisoner. And if that weren't enough, all its employees have marital problems. Add to this mess, is a railway company president who is a child molester who just happened to molest the wife of the engine driver when she was a child. The engine-driver wasn't too happy when he learned this part of his wife's past. Oh, and the wife of the deputy station master is having an affair with the engine-driver. There are the corrupt officials and discussion of the peculiar French system whereby the judiciary is literally part of the executive branch and subject to undue influence depending on current political pressures.
What the reader will find peculiar is that despite all the homicidal and sexual rage going on, each employee is very attentive to his or her duty. Yet, there's murder and railway mayhem but in the end, all the guilty manage to get their comeuppance, either at the point of a knife, or under the wheels of a train. And there's plenty of sex going on. Just about all the time. Cars bang together at the marshalling-yard. Sex. Trains rush by, shaking the house. Sex. Just about every loud noise that goes on in a railway junction is accompanying by someone having sex.
There's an interesting discussion about the relationship between an engine driver and his locomotive. Zola maintains that this relationship is akin to the relationship between a man and his mistress. Each engine is a separate living entity and must be attended to, as a man might attend to a woman he loves. Because the engine-driver here is not only in love with the station master's wife, but also with his beloved Lison, the name given to his assigned locomotive. When Lison slowly dies in a train-wreck devised by the crossing-guard in a fit of jealousy, part of the engine driver dies with her.
The book is an interesting mix of 19th Century railway technology and Zola's somewhat batty theories about what motivates people to kill. Along with some pretty serious social and political commentary.
Darkness On The Edge Of TownLet's get over the slight failings, if failings they be, in this lush, noirish novel. The plot, such as it is, is rickety and the coincidences absolutely Dickensian. The characters, moreover, do not comport with Zola's so-called "Realism," for which he is taken much to task. But thank the devil they don't! Jacques, especially, is driven by atavistic forces beyond his control, reminiscent of Conrad's characters in his better novels. - To my mind, there is nothing more unreal than what is termed "Realism." I could quote an entire page from Proust on why this is so, but I shall be an urbane reviewer and forbear.
This book, as many others have pointed out, owes its dark heart not so much to Darwin as to Poe. In point of fact, I have never read a novel that is so stamped with Poe's influence, from the money and pelf taken from the murdered President hidden under the Roubauds' floorboard until it eats into their hearts - "The Tell-Tale Heart" - to the dark atmospherics that permeate the work. But the work of Poe's to which Zola is most indebted is Poe's essay, "The Imp of The Perverse." In one part of the essay, Poe describes it as that urge (sometimes faint, sometimes profound) that comes on one at the top of a precipice or at the edge of a chasm to let oneself go and plunge into it. And who of us has not stood looking down with our hands glued to a guardrail and not felt this inner tug? This is how Jacques feels when sexually aroused. Is this all so alien and "unreal," or do we simply not like to admit these things to ourselves? The question is, ahem, rhetorical.
This novel, despite its dark content, is so swimmingly delightful to read that one almost forgets the plot and the murders. And, much of this delight, mirabile dictu, is due to the steam locomotive:
"The express engine stood motionless, letting off from its safety valve a great jet of steam up into all this blackness, and there it flaked off into little wisps, bedewing with white tears the limitless funereal hangings of the heavens."
I had to stop several times during the novel and re-read passages like the above, so as to savour every word.
Yes, the courts are corrupt, the characters are more than a touch Gothic and murders most foul abound. The odd thing is that not one of these things seems to matter at all in the great scheme of things. Unlike Zola's other novels that I have read, this novel is forward-looking, away from the Nineteenth Century strait jacket of "Realism" towards the deeper novels of Conrad and others, who delve into the inner dream that is life.
I can't recall such a horrific novel that I've both enjoyed and appreciated so much!
One of Zola's better novels - violent and challengingZola's "La Bete Humaine" appears to be two books crammed into one; the first - and dominant - story is that of people undergoing moral and cultural deterioration as a result of technology and industrialization. Railroads are absolutely central to the novel, being the fastest mode of transportation at the time and reshaping rural society into a series of isolated stopping-points. Similar things have been said/written about the highway culture of America, but nobody can go over the top like Zola.
There is the secondary story of a bumbling legal system, where a murder investigation is carried out by ego and wrongheaded "instinct," rather than, you know, facts.
"La Bete Humaine" is a great read and I think it's better than "Nana" and "The Earth" (which are both very good), but somewhere short of "Germinal." Woven into the story, in no subtle terms, is a description of severely perverse and just plain evil motives. Another example of classic literature that is completely approachable by dedicated fans of genre fiction, should they decide to try it.
Murder on the PARIS express meets Tell Tale HeartThis is the first Zola novel I have read and I could not put it down. Though in many instances the author gives very lengthy and detailed descriptions that slow the flow of the novel, the plight of the main characters finds a way to captivate the audience and keep them reading. This book, written in the late 19th century, has all the elements that current suspense fiction is famous for. Murder, cover up, suspicion, adultry, jealousy, revenge; the list goes on and on.
Zola meets Dostoevski at Kafka's houseThis is one of the most violent novels ever written. As other novels in the Rougon-Macquart series focused on alcoholism or prostitution or politics or the artworld, this novel focuses on murder. It seems that every character here is some kind of murderer, that the entire human race consists either of murderers or potential murderers needing only the right spark to set off their explosions. The setting for Zola's story is the world of the Paris railroad, the neighborhood around the Gare St.Lazare, a fitting environment in which to place people who often seem more like mechanized murder-machines than well-rounded human beings. The power of this novel comes not from its realism but from its strangeness. It is, in its way, as bizarre as anything concocted by Hoffmann or Poe. This is where Zola's Naturalism comes full-circle and meets the Poe-esque terror of "Therese Raquin", Zola's early 'Naturalistic' ghost story. The conjunction gives this novel more of a Modernist feel than we usually find in Zola's work.
I should also mention the prose. The publisher's choice of a Monet 'Gare St.Lazare' painting for the cover of this edition is fitting because Zola's prose here seems to be influenced by his own experience of Impressionist paintings. It seems that Monet and his cohorts taught Zola how to see and describe the modern world in a new way.
Product DescriptionÉmile Zola, né à Paris le 2 avril 1840, mort à Paris le 29 septembre 1902, est un écrivain, journaliste et homme public français, considéré comme le chef de file du naturalisme.C’est l'un des romanciers français les plus universellement populaires, l'un des plus publiés et traduits au monde. Ses romans ont connu de très nombreuses adaptations au cinéma et à la télévision. Sa vie et son Å“uvre ont fait l'objet de nombreuses études historiques. Sur le plan littéraire, il est principalement connu pour Les Rougon-Macquart, fresque romanesque en vingt volumes dépeignant la société française sous le Second Empire. Les dernières années de sa vie ont été marquées par son engagement dans l'affaire Dreyfus avec la publication en janvier 1898, dans le quotidien L'Aurore, de l'article intitulé « J’Accuse…! » qui lui a valu un procès pour diffamation et un exil à Londres.
Émile François Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus. More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution. The series examines two branches of a single family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations. From 1877 onwards with the publication of l'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy–he was better paid than Victor Hugo, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three 'cities', Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity (Claude Bernard), social manichaeism and idealistic socialism, resonate with those of Nadar, Manet and subsequently Flaubert. - Wikipedia
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