Series
Publication
Le Livre de Poche (2006), 510 pages
Original publication date
1887
Collections
Genres
Description
Part of the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Earth was regarded by Émile Zola's as his greatest novel. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmée. When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family. Aging and Lear-like, Old Man Fouan has decided to divide his land between his three children: his penny-pinching daughter Fanny, his eldest son - a far from holy figure known as 'Jesus Christ' - and the lecherous Buteau, Macquart's friend. But in a community where land is everything, sibling rivalry quickly turns to brutal hatred, as Buteau declares himself unsatisfied with his lot. A fascinating portrayal of a struggling but decadent community, The Earth offers a compelling exploration of the destructive nature of human ignorance and greed. Douglas Parmée's translation vividly conveys the naturalistic tone of the original in clear, contemporary English. This edition also includes an introduction, exploring Zola's motivation in writing The Earth and considering its influence on his contemporaries. Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years, including Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), The Beast Within (1890), Nana (1880), and The Drinking Den (1877). If you enjoyed The Earth, you might like Zola's Germinal, also available in Penguin Classics.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member zolasdisciple
I read this book in 2 hours and cried for about an hour after i finished it. It is so moving. So real and expressive.Like all of his books the perefection of La terre makes it hard to explain. What goes on in zolas books is more than a situation Yet a life. and it is impossible to describe someones
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life. a must read for all of those who appreciate literature and psychology at its finest. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
When you've already pulled out all the stops, as Zola did in both L'Assommoir and Germinal, how is it possible to go further? Fortunately, Camille Saint-Saëns had shown the way with his third symphony the year before Zola wrote La Terre: all you have to do is end with a complete symphony orchestra
This is a book that passes from a gentle, bucolic opening chapter (a man casts his seed on the ground; a teenage girl manipulates a bull's penis...), via fraud, theft, ingratitude, drunken orgies, incest, casual violence and an entire chapter of Rabelaisian farting, to an epic conclusion where rape and murder are brought together with more agricultural disasters than you would find in a stack of Thomas Hardy novels. Nothing is done by halves, nothing is swept under the carpets (not that anyone in this book has a carpet), everything that you can think of that's nasty and offensive about human beings is out there, vaunting itself.
Zola's already shown us numerous times that extreme poverty brings out the worst in human nature: here he's having a go at the way being absolutely dependent on possession of land corrupts human relationships in peasant communities, especially in the light of post-revolutionary inheritance laws that force the division of property. Because everyone wants an equal share of the best land, people can't afford to trust their siblings, or their parents, or their children, and fields are reduced to handkerchief size. No-one can afford to marry someone without a useful parcel of land, and there's every incentive to cheat, murder and rape.
Meanwhile, it also turns out that we're living in a world where farmers overseas can produce grain far more cheaply, and where industry in France is putting pressure on the government to keep food prices at a level where domestic farmers can't possibly cover their costs (plus ça change...). Even the progressive "scientific" farmer, Hourdequin, who has a large land-holding acquired cheaply by his father during the dismantling of aristocratic estates, can't make money.
And everyone in the village is corrupt in one way or another. The woman with the superb vegetables? Manures her garden with human waste. The little girl with the geese? Check your pockets after she's gone past. That nice, retired middle-class couple? Owners of the most successful brothel in Chartres. The café proprietor? A cellar full of untaxed wine. The priest? Well, there isn't one, the council can't agree to spend money on repairing the presbytery. And so on.
A book every town-dweller should read before moving to the country!
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in the room in addition to an organ playing full-blast...This is a book that passes from a gentle, bucolic opening chapter (a man casts his seed on the ground; a teenage girl manipulates a bull's penis...), via fraud, theft, ingratitude, drunken orgies, incest, casual violence and an entire chapter of Rabelaisian farting, to an epic conclusion where rape and murder are brought together with more agricultural disasters than you would find in a stack of Thomas Hardy novels. Nothing is done by halves, nothing is swept under the carpets (not that anyone in this book has a carpet), everything that you can think of that's nasty and offensive about human beings is out there, vaunting itself.
Zola's already shown us numerous times that extreme poverty brings out the worst in human nature: here he's having a go at the way being absolutely dependent on possession of land corrupts human relationships in peasant communities, especially in the light of post-revolutionary inheritance laws that force the division of property. Because everyone wants an equal share of the best land, people can't afford to trust their siblings, or their parents, or their children, and fields are reduced to handkerchief size. No-one can afford to marry someone without a useful parcel of land, and there's every incentive to cheat, murder and rape.
Meanwhile, it also turns out that we're living in a world where farmers overseas can produce grain far more cheaply, and where industry in France is putting pressure on the government to keep food prices at a level where domestic farmers can't possibly cover their costs (plus ça change...). Even the progressive "scientific" farmer, Hourdequin, who has a large land-holding acquired cheaply by his father during the dismantling of aristocratic estates, can't make money.
And everyone in the village is corrupt in one way or another. The woman with the superb vegetables? Manures her garden with human waste. The little girl with the geese? Check your pockets after she's gone past. That nice, retired middle-class couple? Owners of the most successful brothel in Chartres. The café proprietor? A cellar full of untaxed wine. The priest? Well, there isn't one, the council can't agree to spend money on repairing the presbytery. And so on.
A book every town-dweller should read before moving to the country!
Show Less
LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
This continues my 10 year+ saga of reading the Rougon MacQuart series. This is #15 of 20 in the order I am reading them (order of publication). This is also one I had read previously, many years ago (30 or 40 years) at a time when I read several of the more famous novels in the series (in no
In this one Zola takes on the peasants/farmers. The rights of farmers to receive fair compensation for their crops were in constant conflict with the rights of the toiling masses (workers) to eat (buy food). Put simply if the farmers are paid more for the crops, food will become too expensive for workers to buy on the measley wages they are paid by the wealthy business owners and rulers.
And this one is "earthy" in a way I don't recall having been so in my face when I read it before (or even compared to the ones I've read more recently). Maybe I've only read the translations that were "toned down," rather than more modern translations. In any case, the book abounds with double entendres, and there's lots of imagery of bulls and studs, not to mention the male peasant/farmers constantly grabbing the women and pulling them for a roll in the hay, even when the women protest.
The story focuses on Jean Macquart who has just returned from the Battle of Soferino (so prominent in The Radetzky March), and has hired on as a laborer with the largest and wealthiest famer in the area. The other main characters are members of the Fouan family, who start bickering when the father divides his land among his three children. And the point Zola seems to be making is that for the peasant, land is everything. The characters are brutal and greedy, and will stop at nothing to retain their plots of land. We meet some truly awful characters in this one.
Nevertheless, I would say this remains one of the must-reads of the series.
5 stars
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particular order Germinal, Nana, L'Assimmoir, and Earth), but I found I remembered nothing of the story.In this one Zola takes on the peasants/farmers. The rights of farmers to receive fair compensation for their crops were in constant conflict with the rights of the toiling masses (workers) to eat (buy food). Put simply if the farmers are paid more for the crops, food will become too expensive for workers to buy on the measley wages they are paid by the wealthy business owners and rulers.
And this one is "earthy" in a way I don't recall having been so in my face when I read it before (or even compared to the ones I've read more recently). Maybe I've only read the translations that were "toned down," rather than more modern translations. In any case, the book abounds with double entendres, and there's lots of imagery of bulls and studs, not to mention the male peasant/farmers constantly grabbing the women and pulling them for a roll in the hay, even when the women protest.
The story focuses on Jean Macquart who has just returned from the Battle of Soferino (so prominent in The Radetzky March), and has hired on as a laborer with the largest and wealthiest famer in the area. The other main characters are members of the Fouan family, who start bickering when the father divides his land among his three children. And the point Zola seems to be making is that for the peasant, land is everything. The characters are brutal and greedy, and will stop at nothing to retain their plots of land. We meet some truly awful characters in this one.
Nevertheless, I would say this remains one of the must-reads of the series.
5 stars
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LibraryThing member burritapal
Zola is a comedian, besides an author. Here, he creates a countryside full of screamingly-funny French people. They are ignorant, horrible misers, graspingly greedy, rutting 19-century peasants who live in a farming community to the southwest of Paris. The protagonist, Old Man Fouan, is a bully to
His sister, called La Grande, the matriarch of the family, is the biggest pennypincher of all. When Buteau, one of Fouan's sons, and his baby mama Lise decide to get married, they come to La Grande's to invite her:
P.148
"They had to repeat the invitation 10 times before she ended up glumly accepting.
'All right, since you forced me into it, I'll come. But I wouldn't go to so much trouble for anyone else but you.'
Seeing that they didn't get up and go, she had an internal battle since usually in such circumstances, people offered a glass of wine. She made up her mind and went down to The cellar, even though there was a bottle sitting there, opened. The thing was that, for such an occasion, she had some left over wine which had turned, which she couldn't drink it was so sour, and which she called her 'family' wine. She filled two glasses and watched her nephew and niece so closely that they had to empty them without grimacing so as not to hurt her feelings. They left with their throats on fire."
Lise gets pregnant again, despite Buteau's efforts to "pull out." At the same time that she goes into labor, their cow goes into labor. The cow ends up needing the vet, but Lise's labor came on so suddenly that they had to put her down in the middle of the kitchen, in a makeshift birthing bed on the floor. Two neighbor ladies and Lise's sister are assisting, when the vet, forgetting that a birth is taking place, stumbles into the kitchen, triumphantly holding the calf in his arms. He is naked but for a bloody apron tied around him. This makes them all start laughing:
P.217
"Her laughter was rumbling away in her fat bosom and down into her stomach, where it echoed like a gale of wind. She was completely distended and the child's head had started pumping to and fro again like a cannonball about to be fired.
But the climax came when the vet, putting the calf down in front of him, tried to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He left behind a long streak of dung, like a scar, and they all split their sides with laughter while Lise choked and let out shrill cackles like a hen laying an egg.
'Stop it! You're killing me! Stop it, damn you, I can't take it anymore! Oh, my God, it's bursting.'
The hole gaped even wider, so that you could have imagined that Frimat's wife, still on her knees, was going to fall into it; and all at once, like a human cannonball, the baby shot out, all red, with its extremities pale and dripping wet. All they heard was a gurgle, as if a vast bottle was being empty. Then the baby started crying while its mother went on laughing even more, shaking like a goatskin bottle that was deflating. Cries at one end, laughter at the other. Buteau was slapping his thighs, Bécu's wife was holding her sides, Patoir was guffawing loudly, and even Francoise, whose hand had been crushed by Lise during her last push, finally let herself laugh, but she still saw in her mind's eye her sister's gaping belly as a cathedral big enough to swallow her husband whole."
La Grande's biggest enjoyment is to cause problems between her family members:
P.312
"88 years old, her only concern about her death was to leave her heirs both her fortune and the certainty of endless legal battles over it: an extraordinarily complicated Will, Made confusing for the sheer pleasure of it, meant that under the pretext of not doing wrong by anyone, she would force them to tear each other apart. Her idea, since you couldn't take her goods and chattels with her, was to go off with the consolation at least of knowing that they would poison the rest of the family. She had no greater amusement than to see the family eat away at each other."
I felt sorry for Old Fouan when, one by one, all his family turns him out, until I remember how mean he had been to his wife and children, so I believe he taught them how to behave like that.
Zola's characters will give you many belly laughs, as you read through some of the wildest scenes with the people who inhabit his story. Moreover, the translator's work makes for a true-feeling, smooth read.
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his wife and grown children. The story revolves around him deciding to split up his farmland between his three grown children, as he has become too old to work the land anymore, and what happens afterwards.His sister, called La Grande, the matriarch of the family, is the biggest pennypincher of all. When Buteau, one of Fouan's sons, and his baby mama Lise decide to get married, they come to La Grande's to invite her:
P.148
"They had to repeat the invitation 10 times before she ended up glumly accepting.
'All right, since you forced me into it, I'll come. But I wouldn't go to so much trouble for anyone else but you.'
Seeing that they didn't get up and go, she had an internal battle since usually in such circumstances, people offered a glass of wine. She made up her mind and went down to The cellar, even though there was a bottle sitting there, opened. The thing was that, for such an occasion, she had some left over wine which had turned, which she couldn't drink it was so sour, and which she called her 'family' wine. She filled two glasses and watched her nephew and niece so closely that they had to empty them without grimacing so as not to hurt her feelings. They left with their throats on fire."
Lise gets pregnant again, despite Buteau's efforts to "pull out." At the same time that she goes into labor, their cow goes into labor. The cow ends up needing the vet, but Lise's labor came on so suddenly that they had to put her down in the middle of the kitchen, in a makeshift birthing bed on the floor. Two neighbor ladies and Lise's sister are assisting, when the vet, forgetting that a birth is taking place, stumbles into the kitchen, triumphantly holding the calf in his arms. He is naked but for a bloody apron tied around him. This makes them all start laughing:
P.217
"Her laughter was rumbling away in her fat bosom and down into her stomach, where it echoed like a gale of wind. She was completely distended and the child's head had started pumping to and fro again like a cannonball about to be fired.
But the climax came when the vet, putting the calf down in front of him, tried to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He left behind a long streak of dung, like a scar, and they all split their sides with laughter while Lise choked and let out shrill cackles like a hen laying an egg.
'Stop it! You're killing me! Stop it, damn you, I can't take it anymore! Oh, my God, it's bursting.'
The hole gaped even wider, so that you could have imagined that Frimat's wife, still on her knees, was going to fall into it; and all at once, like a human cannonball, the baby shot out, all red, with its extremities pale and dripping wet. All they heard was a gurgle, as if a vast bottle was being empty. Then the baby started crying while its mother went on laughing even more, shaking like a goatskin bottle that was deflating. Cries at one end, laughter at the other. Buteau was slapping his thighs, Bécu's wife was holding her sides, Patoir was guffawing loudly, and even Francoise, whose hand had been crushed by Lise during her last push, finally let herself laugh, but she still saw in her mind's eye her sister's gaping belly as a cathedral big enough to swallow her husband whole."
La Grande's biggest enjoyment is to cause problems between her family members:
P.312
"88 years old, her only concern about her death was to leave her heirs both her fortune and the certainty of endless legal battles over it: an extraordinarily complicated Will, Made confusing for the sheer pleasure of it, meant that under the pretext of not doing wrong by anyone, she would force them to tear each other apart. Her idea, since you couldn't take her goods and chattels with her, was to go off with the consolation at least of knowing that they would poison the rest of the family. She had no greater amusement than to see the family eat away at each other."
I felt sorry for Old Fouan when, one by one, all his family turns him out, until I remember how mean he had been to his wife and children, so I believe he taught them how to behave like that.
Zola's characters will give you many belly laughs, as you read through some of the wildest scenes with the people who inhabit his story. Moreover, the translator's work makes for a true-feeling, smooth read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member therebelprince
"If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villages that clung to it like nests of vermin, the human insects that lived off its flesh, were enough to dishonour it and blight any contact with it."
Wandering, impoverished veteran Jean Macquart finds himself in a farming village in
Where The Belly of Paris rippled with the tastes and smells of food, and The Masterpiece gave off the whiff of paint and canvas, here, Zola takes his cue from the earth itself. The soil, the manure, the blood and sweat and semen. (I will never forget, as a child in my first agriculture class at school, seeing a bull castrated before my eyes.) There's Hyacinthe, better known because of his appearance as Jesus Christ, who is best known for his incredible ability at musical farting. There's Old Mother Poo (or Mother Caca in another translation I've seen) who sells her bounteous produce at market but only to those who don't mind the fact that she uses her own excrement as fertiliser due to her poverty. And there's the opening sequence, which was enough to ruffle the feathers of the well-to-do, in which teenage Francoise throws her hand in to assist a bull who is to short to reach the vagina of the cow he is trying to impregnate.
The always excellent Brian Nelson's Oxford introduction makes mention of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "grotesque realism", a carnival-esque approach first applied to the work of Rabelais, and Nelson is right; the atmosphere of this lengthy novel is more garish, more outsized than many of the works in the series thus far. One of my favourite scenes must be that of Gideon the drunk donkey! And there is much fun and horror to be had in the musical chairs with which an old man is shuffled between his relatives, none of them interested in caring for him but all of them with one eye on the potential inheritance.
By the end of the 1880s, Zola was perhaps France's most famous author, and he no longer felt the need (if he ever had) to coddle his readers. There are scenes here where the author himself makes his presence known in a more forceful, didactic way than we are used to. He still often enjoys unforgettable symbolism (Lise going into labour at the same time as her beloved cow gives birth, the onlookers rushing between the two). His skill at limited third-person perspective has never been better, as he cuts between the viewpoints of the entangled feuds active in the village. But he is also prone to poorly disguising his own moralising in the reported thoughts of Jean Macquart himself. Unusually for this series, it is not really Jean's story, although he is drawn into things late in the piece. Dare I say Zola wanted to write this novel regardless of whether it really fit into his schema?
There are occasional moments here that will give a 21st century reader pause. A revelation near the very end of the novel which a character has just before they are brutally attacked may seem unfair on the part of the reader - or, if psychologically plausible, not built up enough by the author before it comes. Still, this is a richly observed piece of literature. The sumptuous descriptions of the landscape and country life feel so thoroughly freeing. Whether a coal mine, laundrette, food market, parliament, suburban home, or department store, almost every novel in the series thus far has taken place in a deliberately limited sphere. And while we remain in a limited space here too, it's one with vistas and fields as far as the eye can see. An expanse of earth that offers promise or mockery, depending on the eye of the beholder.
For several novels now, the notion of "the Empire" which dominated the early part of the series, has lain dormant, warranting few mentions, if any. Here, though, as the plot skips ahead in bursts from 1860 to 1870, the approaching war clouds grow thicker and clearer. The end may not be here yet - for either the Second Empire or the Rougon-Macquart series - but, if one closes one's eyes and listens carefully, one can hear the thunder.
Wandering, impoverished veteran Jean Macquart finds himself in a farming village in
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Northern France in the early 1860s where he becomes an outsider presence in a drunken, bitter, self-serving community. Spanning a decade, Zola's novel of peasant life, published in the late 1880s, caused him plenty of bad press both in France and England. True, he contracts all the bad things which can occur in rural communities, trapped in cycles of violence and greed, and seems to imply that this town represents everyone. But then again, one could say he did this for the aristocrats of The Kill or the urban bourgeoisie in Pot Luck or the comfortable town lives of those in The Conquest of Plassans. Still, his aggressive characters caused especial outrage this time around, and Earth was the novel which saw his early translations in England cast aside and replaced - after a lengthy obscenity trial - with horribly bowdlerised Victorian niceties that effectively ruined his English-language reputation for half a century or more. Where The Belly of Paris rippled with the tastes and smells of food, and The Masterpiece gave off the whiff of paint and canvas, here, Zola takes his cue from the earth itself. The soil, the manure, the blood and sweat and semen. (I will never forget, as a child in my first agriculture class at school, seeing a bull castrated before my eyes.) There's Hyacinthe, better known because of his appearance as Jesus Christ, who is best known for his incredible ability at musical farting. There's Old Mother Poo (or Mother Caca in another translation I've seen) who sells her bounteous produce at market but only to those who don't mind the fact that she uses her own excrement as fertiliser due to her poverty. And there's the opening sequence, which was enough to ruffle the feathers of the well-to-do, in which teenage Francoise throws her hand in to assist a bull who is to short to reach the vagina of the cow he is trying to impregnate.
The always excellent Brian Nelson's Oxford introduction makes mention of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "grotesque realism", a carnival-esque approach first applied to the work of Rabelais, and Nelson is right; the atmosphere of this lengthy novel is more garish, more outsized than many of the works in the series thus far. One of my favourite scenes must be that of Gideon the drunk donkey! And there is much fun and horror to be had in the musical chairs with which an old man is shuffled between his relatives, none of them interested in caring for him but all of them with one eye on the potential inheritance.
By the end of the 1880s, Zola was perhaps France's most famous author, and he no longer felt the need (if he ever had) to coddle his readers. There are scenes here where the author himself makes his presence known in a more forceful, didactic way than we are used to. He still often enjoys unforgettable symbolism (Lise going into labour at the same time as her beloved cow gives birth, the onlookers rushing between the two). His skill at limited third-person perspective has never been better, as he cuts between the viewpoints of the entangled feuds active in the village. But he is also prone to poorly disguising his own moralising in the reported thoughts of Jean Macquart himself. Unusually for this series, it is not really Jean's story, although he is drawn into things late in the piece. Dare I say Zola wanted to write this novel regardless of whether it really fit into his schema?
There are occasional moments here that will give a 21st century reader pause. A revelation near the very end of the novel which a character has just before they are brutally attacked may seem unfair on the part of the reader - or, if psychologically plausible, not built up enough by the author before it comes. Still, this is a richly observed piece of literature. The sumptuous descriptions of the landscape and country life feel so thoroughly freeing. Whether a coal mine, laundrette, food market, parliament, suburban home, or department store, almost every novel in the series thus far has taken place in a deliberately limited sphere. And while we remain in a limited space here too, it's one with vistas and fields as far as the eye can see. An expanse of earth that offers promise or mockery, depending on the eye of the beholder.
For several novels now, the notion of "the Empire" which dominated the early part of the series, has lain dormant, warranting few mentions, if any. Here, though, as the plot skips ahead in bursts from 1860 to 1870, the approaching war clouds grow thicker and clearer. The end may not be here yet - for either the Second Empire or the Rougon-Macquart series - but, if one closes one's eyes and listens carefully, one can hear the thunder.
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Language
Original language
French
ISBN
225308221X / 9782253082217