Emile Zola, Reve, Oeuvre, Page d'amour, Therese Raquin

Well, Zola is certainly at his worst when he is writing sentimental drivel. Le Reve is about a young woman who literally pines away to marry her boyfriend, the illegitimate son of a Catholic bishop who opposes the marriage. I mean, really. She expires on the first kiss after the ceremony, right there on the church's doorstep, in her wedding gown, surrounded by onlookers. Hopelessly honeyed. Then L'oeuvre is about a painter who marries his model and paints his son right after he dies. "Sounds unsanitary" I said to myself, unmoved. Therese Raquin, by contrast, is striking in its emotional truth and telling detail, about two lovers who conspire and then murder the husband, only to find life unlivable with the fear of prosecution. Even with the incapacitated mother-in-law living with them, an unbelievable plot twist, the novel works beautifully. He really is at his best describing the worst in human nature...

Zola's Rougon-Macquart Series

I have read the first five in this twenty-odd fresco of France's Second Empire, following the legitimate and illegitimate branches of the same family. The best so far is La fortune des Rougon, which launches everything that follows. I also enjoyed Ventre de Paris, about the misfortunes of small shop owners. I am reading Eugene Rougon now, the sixth in the series. I have already read Nana, about prostitution, as well as Germinal, about labor issues, and L'assommoir, about alcoholism. I also read the trilogy about catholicism, Paris, Rome, Lourdes. Catholicism and money, catholicism and the bogus claims of miracles, catholicism and politics...it's a riveting indictment, of course, as with all Zola's efforts. And that poor priest Froment, who keeps having crises of faith right on schedule....But I find his characters don't spring to life as they do in La comedie humaine, by Honore de Balzac, which was Zola's model. No, the real stars are the unjust social conditions, and how fragile middle class status is.

Zola's Germinal

Of course, Zola is famed for his realism, and Germinal is naturalistic, admirably so. But he is also unbelievably depressing. Germinal is about a failed strike by miners who are defeated by capitalism and hunger. Along the way, the same family has the senile grandfather die while strangling a local Lady Bountiful, has a son become handicapped in a mining accident and then work in such clouds of dust he's clearly going to die shortly of lung disease, the father and daughter die in an endlessly described other accident, and the novel close on the mother going back to work at 40 saying: my son and I make 50 cents a day. If there weren't six of us, we'd have enough to eat. It's an excellent novel, but I got depressed reading it. It depresses me all the more to think of all the mining jobs around where I live.

Worthen's D.H. Lawrence, Montefiore's Stalin

John Worthen's biography of D.H. Lawrence certainly makes him come alive. It's filled with telling details and anecdotes, including the memorable quote: "D.H. Lawrence was a giraffe in a world of well-behaved dogs: unexpected, unforgettable, and seeing a good deal farther than most." But since Worthen's task is to prove that Lawrence is less of a misogynist and a sadist than his reputation allows, I think he fails. The details of Lawrence's last months, dying of tuberculosis, brought to mind the final volume of Les Plourdes by Roger Martin du Gard. Endless hemoptysis, coughing up lung pieces, fighting for breath...I just finished reading Sebag Montefiore's Stalin. The subtitle refers to the dictator as the red Czar, and the metaphor sticks throughout the book. It is all magnates and plundering and murders (mass and individual). I don't know anyone who knew that Stalin's wife had committed suicide. Some of the details are revolting, especially with respect to the Ukrainians, and of course Khrushchev's striding onto center stage is ominous. The chapters on World War II are the most riveting, with Stalin defecating in front of his aides during a trip to a battlefield, when no one could be sure the area had been thoroughly demined. The chapters describing the Roosevelt/Churchill/Stalin summits are also interesting since the author has no reverence for either Roosevelt or Churchill...The comparison of Elliott Roosevelt and Vasily Stalin (arrogant, alcoholic, self-destructive, pilots) is especially striking. And Stalin's other son, Yakov, whom he had heroically refused to ransom, had been dead two years before Uncle Joe found out. As the war ended, Joe was agonizing over the fact that he expected him to be killed in prison on the Russian advance. And still the Russians advanced...