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Germinal (Oxford World's Classics)
 
 
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Germinal (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

by Émile Zola (Author), Robert Lethbridge (Contributor), Peter Collier (Translator) "CROSSING the open plain, wading through the thick, dark ink of a starless night, a solitary figure followed the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, which..." (more)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (18 Jun 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0192837028
  • ISBN-13: 978-0192837028
  • Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.2 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 181,284 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #28 in  Books > Fiction > The Classics > Zola, Emile
    #71 in  Books > Fiction > Short Stories > World > French

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Product Description

Review
"Superb."--Professor James Chastain, Ohio University
"This is far and away the best English translation of Germinal currently available. The translator has captured the nineteenth century flavor of the original without sacrificing clarity or meaning. The introduction and notes are excellent and the map of Montsou and vicinity is a stroke of genius."--Professor Richard Cumming, University of Utah


Product Description
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations, Lantier retains his belief in the ultimate germination of a new society, leading to a better world. Germinal is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, but it is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigour and power in this new translation.
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First Sentence
CROSSING the open plain, wading through the thick, dark ink of a starless night, a solitary figure followed the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, which cut its paved pathway straight through ten kilometers of beet fields. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Strike another match..., 13 Jan 2006
By Louise Stanley (Reading, Berkshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Germinal (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
I read this (for pure pleasure) during my A-Levels and it was so literally unputdownable that I got told off countless times for reading it under the desk while I should have been concentrating on my Maths and Chemistry exam study. I think I ended up in tears with the school counsellor after I finished it. That's what a good book should do to even the most harded cynic.

The plot is quite simple and yet quite complex - Etienne (Stephen) Lantier is a character from the Rougon-Macquart family followed in the series' other books - particularly "L'Assomoir", which is a parallel book, "Nana", which follows the fortunes of his sister, and "La Bete Humaine", which is about his brother. After losing his job in Lille he travels to the mining district nearby in search of work, and falls in with the Maheu family. Fomenting a strike from the embers of an ongoing dispute, Lantier rouses the miners against the bourgeoisie, who, in Zola's characteristically even-handed style, also have their own point of view. To go any further into the plot would be to spoil a good story.

OK, so I read it in the Penguin translation rather than the original (I'd like to try though since I can read French better than I can speak, understand it spoken or write it), but a good translation should get underneath the skin of the author and bring the milieu alive, not only staying faithful to the original but evoking for English readers the sticky, grimy world of Montsou and Le Voreux. I am reading it in Polish translation as well, to see how it reads in a language which is better at capturing magic and mystery rather than the down-to-earth grittiness of English. This edition was also published under the Soviet regime as a piece of "socialist realism" - though Zola would have turned in his grave at some of the small ...changes... that translation has made to some of the incidents.

Great literature should be worth reading for the plot as well as for the language, and Zola succeeds on both counts, taking up the baton from Balzac and Hugo and pushing on towards the modernist literature of Orwell, Sartre and Huxley. Dostoyevsky created the same sort of racy stories in Russia, and both "Crime and Punishment" and "Germinal" are masterpieces of storytelling that don't waste as much time on philosophical rambling as Tolstoy did in "Anna Karenina", in which the plot got lost among a lot of padding.

Although a great period piece, I have seen Zola's stories adapted into other times and places such as wartime London and the Home Counties, and the failed strike could be seen as prophesising the upheavals in recent British politics, with the rise and fall of the fortunes of the Conservative Party as they try to unseat Labour from power. Good literature is always timeless and "Germinal" is one of the books I would recommend to any aspiring politician of any colour, on how to run an effective campaign - or not as the case might be.

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books ever written, 19 Sep 2006
By Mrs. Judith Lugg (Wolverhampton, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I first read this when I was about 12 years old (in an English translation, I hasten to add) as I had run out of reading matter and came across this book in my grandfather's study.

I am now 62 years of age, but have never forgotten the initial impact this made on me. Somehow Zola's writing is so descriptive and evocative that one feels that one is really there in the suffering and squalor along with the characters. The suffering and social deprivation of those times is quite unbelievable as we look back over 150 years.

I do not know who translated that edition but I have read it in the original French since, where it is even more
moving.

If you haven't read it, please do, you'll be glad you did and, as someone else wrote in review, it could even change your life or, at the very least give you much pause for thought.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Quite chilling., 16 Nov 2003
By A Customer
I came across this book on one of the Open University literature courses. It tells a harrowing tale of life in a mining community as the workers gradually starve and are forced into desperate measures for their survival when a new worker, Etienne Lantier, arrives and eventually masterminds a strike against the worsening working conditions endured underground, and the devious new pay structure. The backbreaking working life of the miners is accurately and chillingly portrayed, (you'll never want to go in a lift again!) contrasted with a backdrop of sexual permissiveness in the community. There are echoes of Mrs. Gaskell and 'Love on the Dole'. In all, a chilling evocation of the workers' hellish existence, and familial ties, in nineteenth cnetury France.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The best novel of the 19th Century
This is ?mile Zola's undisputed masterpiece in the Rougon-Macquart novel series. In each of the novels of this series Zola sketches in honest, human detail the life of the working... Read more
Published 2 months ago by M. A. Krul

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favourite books of all time!
Everyone ought to read this book, it's a true classic with a far better story than Hugo's Les Miserables in my opinion. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Lulushka8

5.0 out of 5 stars claustrophobic excellence.
I read this book for an ou course. If it had not been on the list there is no way I could have finished it. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Mrs. D. L. Cox

5.0 out of 5 stars I don't believe I'll read a better book
I love this book. I read it over twenty years ago but the closing chapters, set in the mine, will never leave me. It is brilliant. One of my all time top novels.
Published on 28 May 2007 by lilysmum

5.0 out of 5 stars Mandatory reading and socially harrowing
Some classic novels are worthy but a chore; others are great to study academically; fewer combine adept social commentary with genius literary ability and a compelling... Read more
Published on 9 Feb 2005 by Tony Jackson

5.0 out of 5 stars An emotional rollercoaster
This is the 5th novel by Zola I have read and the best yet. The novel takes you on an emotional rollercoaster as you accompany the Maheu family through their bitter struggle to... Read more
Published on 26 Jan 2005

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, exciting story that knocks spots off Dickens
Why would anyone read Dickens when they could read the work of Zola. Whilst Dickens wrote twee, contrived stories Zola was writing passionate, exciting sweeping novels about real... Read more
Published on 29 Jul 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars A great reality-checher
This is a brilliant book which makes you realise that there was a huge struggle going on quite literally underneath 19th century society (aptly signified by the mines) It doesn't... Read more
Published on 21 Sep 2000

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