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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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night, a lone man was following the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou,1 ten kilometres of paved road that cut directly across the fields of beet. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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.
This book had a major impact on me when I read it as a teenager - a Realist novel read in my own time to contrast with the Romantic works of Flaubert which I was dealing with for A level. I then returned to it at University - but importantly have subsequently re-read it more than once for pleasure as well as confidently giving it as a present to friends with a ""great read" recommendation.
It is hard to believe that society has changed so much and that we are so ignorant of the massive poverty and social injustice which existed relatively recently in Europe. This epic novel, as with many of Zola's novels, takes you into the startling detail of life in industrial France - with wonderful characterisation, really moving human stories and exciting & distressing plot .
It really has everything - and it may well change your outlook on life . I wholeheartedly recommend this as one of the greats
The story describes the experience of an ex-machinist, Etienne Lantier (who appears as such in one of the other novels) in the Voreux and other mines around the town of Montsou, situated somewhat near Valenciennes. Starving and looking for a job in a period of industrial crisis, he is introduced to the reader as he arrives at the mine. Etienne soon manages to get a job there, and gets to know the great variety of characters that make up the local mining town. But his deep-felt social activism, combined with his somewhat higher education than the local miners, sets in motion a chain of events that changes both his life and that of the reader forever.
Zola's brilliant description of the reality of the struggle between classes and the effects, positive and negative, that zealous struggle for the improvement of the world can have on individual humans in dire straits is sure to haunt the reader for a long time. The author manages to describe both the miners, in their jealousy, pride, poverty and despair, as well as the local bourgeoisie in their misguidedness, personal issues and the pressures of capitalism with a deep understanding of the human psyche. The interactions between humans under pressure is described in powerful, terse dialogues and evocative passages.
The political and social background of the miners' desperate struggle for a decent living is the general theme of the book, but Zola avoids stereotypes and never clearly takes sides for any particular political position, deftly avoiding preachiness or sentimentalism. The incredible hardship and difficulty of the miners' lives and the degree to which the main characters manage to maintain a sense of dignity is sure to move even the coldest-hearted person, but Germinal is not a Dickens work and tear-jerking is more an effect of the book's quality than the goal of the writer.
Above all, however, Zola's best work is simply an incredibly riveting, exciting, deeply moving and tremendously powerful work of fiction. Read the rise and fall of Lantier, Maheu, Bonnemort, Deneulin, Catherine, Souvarin and the other comrades, and weep. As an aside, it must be noted that despite what one might expect, this book was not popular with Marx and Engels; they preferred De Balzac to Zola.
I must say that as much as I enjoyed Conrad's novels, this book has made me... Read more
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