I watched a movie about Zola many years ago because I watched all the Oscar winners. The film about his life won in 1938. I have always wanted to read a book by him, so I was delighted to see it on Mustich's list.
The guy can write. It is depressing. Why are French novels often so depressing?
The cry of the poor is the theme.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
You don’t write a cycle of twenty novels unless you’re an uncommonly ambitious writer. And Émile Zola, the engineer of literary naturalism in nineteenth-century France, was nothing if not ambitious. He wanted to capture in prose the entirety of French society—rich and poor, urban and rural—under the Second Empire. The outstanding novel of Zola’s cycle is Germinal, a gritty portrayal of a coal miners’ strike in northern France in the 1860s. Germinal, with its unsparing look at lives and labors of the working class, is an exceptionally gripping novel. In the darkness of the coal pits it illuminates signal battles of the coming age: between labor and capital, between nature and industry, and between the promise of socialism and the hazards of its practice. The author’s contemporaries certainly bore witness to its impact: When Zola died in Paris in 1902, crowds followed his coffin as a parade carried it to the Montmartre cemetery. As the cortège passed, they shouted one word: “Germinal!”
