The Fortunes of the Rougons - Emile Zola

 Finally, I found where to begin with Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence.   Some of the novels I have already read and reviewed here belong to the cycle (The Belly of Paris, The Debacle, Germinal) but I wanted to start at the undisputed beginning.   That is here, with The Fortunes of the Rougons (1871).

The book is set in December 1851, when a coup d'etat in Paris installed Napoleon III and the Second Empire.   The key events were in Paris but there were also popular uprisings all over the country, including Provence.   Zola was partly raised in Aix-en-Provence which here he renames Plassans.

Zola made a key decision - to confine the action to Plassans and its immediate neighbourhood.   Action elsewhere is brought in by letter and, to a much lesser extent, newspapers.   There is a key period in the month when nobody in Plassans knows what is happening elsewhere.   Pierre Rougon, a middleaged bourgois, has a son in Paris who keeps him as up-to-date as he can.   Backed by his ambitious wife Felicite, Pierre seizes control of the town and acts as mayor - the actual mayor having been taken prisoner by the local insurgents.

The complicating factor, the stroke of authorial brilliance, is that Rougon's implacable enemy is his half-brother Antoine Macquart, who sets himself up as a rebel purely to oppose Pierre.   There was also a half-sister, Ursule, who married and moved away.   One of her sons has married one of Pierre's daughters, the other, seventeen year-old Silvere, is living in Plassans with his grandmother, the half-mad eccentric 'Aunt Dide'.

Silvere begins and ends the novel.   It begins with him and his thirteen year-old sweetheart waiting to join the army of insurgents heading their way.   The rebels pass through Plassans at dead of night, simply capturing a trio of big wigs they happen upon and moving on.   Around the midpoint of the book there is a battle in which the rebels are defeated.   Miette is killed, Silvere captured.   It ends with him being returned to Plassans where a gendarme he accidentally injured executes him.

Zola's second key decision is the way in which he includes the necessary back story.   There is a lot of it and it has to go in because, as he tells us in the preface, Zola's purpose is to prove that "Heredity, like gravity, has its laws."   Yet it must not be allowed to outweigh or unbalance the narrative.   So in Chapter One he deals with the rebels passing through Plassans and leaving with Silvere and Miette.   Chapter Two describes Plassans waking the next day, speculating on what happened.   Thus we meet people who live there and the relationships between some of them.   We meet the Rougons.   Pierre is embarrassed by his mother and half-siblings.   We then go back fifty years to when Dide was widowed and took up with the poacher Macquart, who sired Antoine and Ursule.

And so on...   The book hops backward and forwards in time in substantial chunks.   This means we always know when and where we are and are always uncovering more insights into the main characters.   By the end of the book this is what we are expecting, so Zola cleverly does something different.   The first clues to Silvere's death are delivered in what seems like a waking dream of Aunt Dide.   Even she does not know if it is real or not.   Antoine and Pierre both assume she is talking about the long-gone poacher Macquart and his lifelong war with the gendarmerie.   But no, Dide actually witnessed the death of her grandson while out buying brandy for Antoine - and wow, does that hit home.

I've been spending a lot of time recently considering the French Naturalists and Realists, notably the trio of Zola, Maupassant and Huysmans.   The fact is, I enjoy them all.   The Fortunes of the Rougons I particularly enjoyed.

Next question: do I continue in publication order or in the order recommended by whoever wrote the Wikipedia  essay?

The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola

 

This is the Modern Library translation of Zola's shortish novel of Les Halles, the third in the Rougon-Macquart sequence.  Florent Quenu has finally returned to Paris, having escaped from Devil's Island.  He was unfairly imprisoned for a minor role in an abortive uprising.  He finds sanctuary with his brother who runs a successful charcuterie on the fringes of the newly-built market complex with his wife, the Beautiful Lisa.  Florent is ultimately found a job as inspector of the fish market where he is targeted by the Beautiful Norman, who initially only wants to spite her rival Lisa.

Meanwhile Florent has slipped back into his anti-establishment ways.  He gets subsumed (he rarely takes action) into a gaggle of local hotheads who gather at a local bar.  This draws the attention of the market busybodies and ultimately leads to disaster.

The Belly of Paris hinges on the fat and the thin.  Florent is constitutionally thin whereas Lisa is fat and complacent and conservative.  All of life is contained within the huge market, a world of its own with officials like Florent, merchants like the Norman, and an underclass which subsists on the leftover produce.  As always with Zola the world is mapped and documented.  What makes this novel different is the focus on food.  Several times key revelations are set against the preparation of food.  This is where this translation comes into its own.  Mark Kurlansky is a food writer who came into translation through his researches into international cuisine.  He knows exactly what Zola is talking about and the food sequences really glisten with fat and scent and colour.

A wonderful translation of an interesting book.  Highly recommended.

The Debacle - Emile Zola

The Debacle is intended to be part of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, but it is really a historical novel - recent history which Zola himself witnessed and reported as a journalist.  That is both the problem and the book's appeal.

Jean Macquart is a peasant who has joined the army to better himself.  This plunges him, in 1870, into the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, which was short and brutal, which set the scene for the horrors of World War I, and which haunted French sensibilities for almost a century.  The French were beset with hopeless leaders, political and military.  Napoleon III was dying and wasn't even emperor in his own household.  Macmahon, marshal of France, suffered the indignity of being shot in the backside very early in the climactic battle of Sedan and was hors de combat for the rest of the day.  The Prussians had Bismarck and needed no more.  The army in the field surrendered, Napoleon abdicated, but Paris refused to give in.  The Prussians therefore laid siege over the winter.  Early in 1871 the Government of National Defence under Adolphe Thiers made peace and the Prussians withdrew.  Again Paris struck out on its own, forming the Commune, the first socialist, feminist, revolutionary autonomy.  Thiers, now President of the Second Republic, moved to Versailles and set about conquering his own capital.  The Commune only lasted from the middle of March to the end of May before going out - literally - in a blaze of glory.  They burned down official buildings, monuments and the imperial palace.  One of the city arsenals blew up.

It's an incredibly complex story which Zola divides into three: the build-up to battle, the battle, and the siege and commune.  He sets his tangled personal stories against this background but, being real events which the majority of his first readers (in 1892) had experienced, historical fact always has to dominate fictional fancy.  The result is inevitable - fiction loses every time.  Jean is wounded in the battle - he has to spend an unconscionable time recovering (and is then hospitalised for fever in Brussels) but is suddenly fit enough to enlist in time for the Versailles army to invade Paris because Zola needs to bring him face to face with his counterpart Maurice Levasseur, who has taken up the cause of the Commune.

Frankly, the characterisation is so sketchy that I didn't know the surnames were Macquart and Levasseur until I looked them up just now.  Jean is simple and honest, Maurice is educated and unpredictable, his sister is an angel, their uncle a goblin.  And yet, as always with Zola, there are fictional moments of astonishing power: for example, what the saboteurs hiding in the woods do to the spy 'Goliath', and particularly the unspoken interaction between Goliath and the girl he fathered a child with.

I can't pretend I loved The Debacle - Zola is not a lovable writer.  But I was impressed, startled and always intrigued.  I bought the ebook because I was researching the Paris Commune for one of my own projects and was frustrated by the lack of impartial witnesses.  Zola certainly filled that hole and I can confirm that nothing here is contradicted by historical scholars.  On the contrary, there is something the scholars can never tell us - what it was like to be there.

La Bete Humaine - Emile Zola

Zola's naturalism at its most extreme, humanity reduced to its most bestial. La Bete Humaine is really tough going. Everybody is determined to kill everyone else. Roubaud and Severine murder Grandmorin on the train between Paris and Le Havre. This takes place near the signal box run by Misard and the level crossing operated by his stepdaughter Flore. Misard is slowing poisoning his wife for her inheritance and Flore kills a dozen people because she is infatuated with her foster brother Jacques. Jacques's little problem is that he wants to murder every woman who excites him. He thinks that Severine has helped him over this minor difficulty and joins in her plan to murder her husband Roubaud. This is more than a tangled web. This is crazy. Yet Zola's gifts as a storyteller somehow carry the reader forward. It is one of those books you are going to finish, whether you like it or not. Personally, I'm not sure whether I like it. I certainly admire it. And I'm definitely glad I read it.