検索キーワード： 著者 "Emile Zola" すべてのカテゴリー

"L'Assommoir", septième volume de la série "Les Rougon-Macquart" publié en 1877, est considéré comme le plus grand roman d'Émile Zola. L'ouvrage est totalement consacré au monde ouvrier et, selon Zola, c'est "le premier roman sur le peuple, qui ne mente pas et qui ait l'odeur du peuple". L'écrivain y restitue la langue et les mœurs des ouvriers, tout en décrivant les ravages causés par la misère et l'alcoolisme. "L'Assommoir" raconte la grandeur puis la décadence de Gervaise Macquart, honnête blanchisseuse de la Goutte d'Or dans le Paris populaire de 1850.

Le Figaro du 23 janvier 1868 à propos de Thérèse Raquin : « C'est le résidu de toutes les horreurs. Le sujet est simple, le remords physique de deux amants qui tuent le mari mais qui, ce mari tué, n'osent plus s'étreindre, car voici le supplice délicat qui les attend : ""Ils poussèrent un cri et se pressèrent davantage, afin de ne pas laisser entre leur chair de place pour le noyé. Et ils sentaient toujours des lambeaux de Camille, qui s'écrasait ignoblement entre eux.""

Sex, betrayal, murder and corruption form the basis of this sensational novel by one of the leading French authors of the 19th century. Jacques Lantier is a man with a hereditary homicidal lust. When he sees Roubaud and his wife Severine slit the throat of a wealthy nobleman, it is the catalyst for a string of murders in a convoluted plot full of horror and suspense.

First published between 1870 and 1893, Émile Zola’s 20-book cycle chronicling four generations of the Rougon-Macquarts was a shocking exposé of the decadence, degradation and moral decay of 19th-century France. It included some of his greatest novels, among them his masterpiece, Germinal. These innovative, ambitious dramas, first broadcast on Radio 4 over 24 hours in 2015-16, are a radical reimagining of Zola’s classic series, introducing us to 104-year-old matriarch, Dide, imprisoned in an asylum in southern France. 

Against the backdrop of political and legal corruption in Second Empire France, La Bête Humaine (1890) contrasts the technological advancements of the Machine Age with the primitive and timeless human impulse to possess through killing and to kill through possession. The lives of two railwaymen on the Paris-to-Le-Havre line are fatally entwined by their love for the same woman in this shocking account of brutal violence, greed, revenge, and repression.

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognized artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling painter who dreams of conquering the Paris art scene with his revolutionary "open air" style of painting. Discouraged and mocked, Claude retreats to the countryside with a young woman from Clermont, with whom he has fallen in love, before returning to Paris, where he continues to experience rejection at every turn.

After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business, and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation, and violence.

Although it is little known in this country, The Belly of Paris is considered one of Émile Zola’s best novels. Set in the newly built food markets of Paris, it is a story of wealth and poverty set against a sumptuous banquet of food and commerce. Having just escaped from prison after being...

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion...

Brought to you by Penguin. Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in northern France under the second empire. At the centre of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a...

Il finanziere Saccard è quasi ridotto in miseria, ma ha un'idea straordinaria: fondare una banca che finanzi grandi opere in Medio Oriente (sono gli anni della costruzione del Canale di Suez). Si chiamerà Banca Universale. Il valore delle azioni cresce un po' troppo rapidamente, ma la scommessa può lo stesso funzionare se tutti cooperano. L'importante è che nessuno inizi a vendere.

The Zola Library opens its doors to the whole, unabridged force of Émile Zola’s novels. Here, each book is read in full, chapter by chapter, with no compromise and no ornament to soften the truth. Enter the streets, homes, mines, markets, and hearts of humanity, where passion, hunger, ambition, and fate press upon every life. This is literature as testimony: vast, exacting, and alive.

Zola's original French publication, Au Bonheur des Dames ("The Ladies' Delight"), published 1882, is the eleventh novel in his Rougon-Macquart series. This English translation by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, was published in 1886. It's a glitzy, fast paced Parisian drama depicting life at the world's first department store, revealing its many innovative marketing concepts, fashion, glamour, lust, greed, courage, deception, human foibles, and the vision and financial risk-taking that led to a world transformation in shopping -- one that set all the little shop keepers on their heads. All this is ...

Anna Coupeau, known as Nana, makes her debut in 1867 at the Theatre de Varietes, and is an instant sensation. It is as a prostitute, however, that she becomes infamous in Paris, as a destroyer of men. She meets with an ignominious end at the very eve of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. - Summary by Mark Leder

This, the fifth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart Cycle, serves effectively as a sequel to "The Conquest of Plassans". Serge Mouret, the son of Francois and Marthe, is now a priest, in the little backwater of Artauds. After he suffers a breakdown, with subsequent amnesia, however, he enters into a romance with the childlike Albine, which leads to catastrophe. - Summary by Mark Leder

Gervaise Macquart runs away to Paris with Lantier, to work as a washerwoman. Lantier abandons her and their two sons. She then marries the roofer Coupeau, and has a daughter, nicknamed Nana. She opens her own laundry; then everything goes downhill, as both Gervaise and Coupeau succumb to alcoholism. - Summary by Mark Leder

Covering a two-year period, Zola recounts the lives, intrigues, quarrel and loves of a group of five families all living in what was at the time an entirely new social construct, the apartment building. This marks the midpoint of Zola's immense undertaking, the Rougon-Macquart Cycle. - Summary by Mark Leder

"A Love Episode" ("Une Page d'Amour") is the eighth volume in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels. It deals with Helene Mouret Grandjean, a widow, her daughter Jeanne, and her love for Dr. Deberle. - Summary by Mark Leder

Orpheline, Pauline Quenu est recueillie par des parents dans un village battu par les vents de Normandie. Très vite, Pauline s'attache à Lazare, un jeune homme tourmenté, hanté par la maladie et la peur de la mort. Tandis qu'elle donne sans compter — son affection, son énergie, jusqu'à ses biens —, elle voit peu à peu ses espoirs s'effondrer. Dans ce huis clos face à la mer, où les tempêtes semblent répondre aux tourments intérieurs, Émile Zola livre un roman poignant sur la souffrance, l'amour silencieux et la force de continuer à vivre, malgré tout.

The first book in the 20-novel Rougon-Macquart Cycle. A monument of French naturalism. The sprawling tale of a family in Provence, during the Second Empire, the family that grew out of the liaisons between Adelaide Fouque and her husband Rougons, and the smuggler Macquart. - Summary by Mark Leder