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Title: Nana. (Penguin Classics) by Emile Zola ISBN: 0-14-044263-4 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1972 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Girl Power in the 1860s
Comment: No drugs, no rock 'n' roll but plenty of sex. Great entertainment in itself, this book is best read as a sequel to "L'Assommoir" whose tragic downtrodden heroine can be said, in a way, to have got her revenge on society through her daughter, Nana. You might say it's a case of the underclass striking back and one wonders how today's acting and modelling scene compares with Second Empire Paris. Someone once said that every woman is sitting on a gold mine and Nana certainly proves it. Trouble is, she also proves the old saying "easy come, easy go". What would have happened if she'd been inoculated against smallpox?
Rating: 2
Summary: Exaggeration
Comment: As the back cover of the book says, Nana by Emile Zola is the story of a woman of very low birth who uses her beauty to conquer the high society men of Paris on her way to becoming a courtesan of immense power and attraction. Nana takes place during the final days of the Second Empire of Napoleon III and actually ends with the event that would herald the downfall of the empire: the declaration of war against Prussia.
Zola is considered the leading member of the naturalist group of writers. Naturalists are concerned with real worldliness. They wish to portray a sense of what life is really like for their characters. They tend more to concentrate on the type of character that they are writing about instead of the character's uniqueness. As such, Nana becomes a story more about courtesans from lowly births than it is about Nana.
Naturalist writing also tends to lend itself to subjects of societal ills and debauchery. Naturalists seek to show the world in all its filth and depravity. To do this they must go where one finds this stuff: in the gutters.
Unfortunately, in his attempt to portray the character types one finds in the company of someone like Nana, Zola has created more caricatures than characters. Few of the characters in Nana where credible participants. Nana herself is unlike anyone you would find in sane society and seems more like an amalgam of various real world influences than a person of one mind.
The male characters of Nana were particularly egregious examples of overzealousness by Zola. The Comte Muffat is Nana's primary benefactor throughout the story. He withstands great hardships and torments from Nana with nary a protest. This may have been believeable if only Muffat had been the victim of Nana's capriciousness; but, she strings along many more men in this manner, robbing them of their dignity and fortunes without so much as a whimper from them.
Nana is compared to a golden fly who rises from the dung heap to taint the high society Parisian world that she invades with her low birth debauchery and sin. Nana may be a metaphor for the overall breakdown of French society which preceded the collapse of the Second Empire; but, Zola would have done better to lay it on less thick. Nana could have been an excellent statement on the necessity of retaining a moral backbone to maintain the fabric of society. Instead, it reads like a cheap nineteenth century soap opera played out with exaggerated, unreal characters.
Rating: 5
Summary: Nana.
Comment: I found the book well written and enjoyable. So much so I have purchased and will read the other books from the cycle (Series). It's evident why numerous books written by Zola have remained classics for so many years.
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Title: L'Assommoir: The Dram Shop (Penguin Classics) by Emile Zola ISBN: 0140447539 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 03 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Germinal (Penguin Classics) by Emile Zola ISBN: 0140440453 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1954 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Therese Raquin (Penguin Classics) by Emile Zola, Leonard Tancock ISBN: 0140441204 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1981 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Cousin Bette (Oxford World's Classics (Paperback)) by Honore De Balzac ISBN: 0192836684 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Ladies' Paradise (Oxford World's Classics (Paperback)) by Emile Zola ISBN: 0192836021 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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