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Available
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Series
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Collection
Publication
Oxford University Press, USA (2014), Paperback, 416 pages
Description
Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Saccard meanwhile conducts his love life as energetically as he does his business, and his empire is seemingly unstoppable. Saccard, last encountered in The Kill (La Curee) in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, is a complex figure whose story intricately intertwines the worlds of politics, finance, and the press. The repercussions of his dealings on all levels of society resonate disturbingly with the financial scandals of more recent times. This is the first new translation for more than a hundred years, and the first unabridged translation in English. The edition includes a wide-ranging introduction and useful historical notes.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
If the previous book in the series was Zola's answer to Crime and punishment, this one seems to be his take on The way we live now. But with more nude scenes than Trollope, and fewer trips to Lowestoft...
Zola brings back Saccard, the tycoon from 16 books ago in La curée; if you were paying
Naturally, all the wheeling and dealing and the strange day-to-day workings of the stock market are described in loving detail, as are many other direct and indirect manifestations of money in Second Empire lives, most of which ultimately lead down to the broker in bad debts and blackmailer, Broch. But what Zola is really interested in is not so much the mechanics of finance but the way that people get emotionally involved with money. Saccard is fond of saying that money is like sex: most of the time we chase it for the short-term pleasure and excitement it brings, and sometimes that pursuit is dirty and nasty, but without all that dirt and guilty pleasure we wouldn't produce any children. Saccard is a fraudster who ruins hundreds of people's lives, but the companies financed by his schemes also produce improvements to the quality of life for many others — jobs, transportation, toys for the children in the orphanage. Meanwhile, the communist thinker, Sigismound, produces precisely nothing. Zola isn't quite defending capitalism, but he's at least ambivalent about it. It's pretty clear that he as a novelist would have little to write about in the ideal Marxist world that Sigismound imagines, for a start!
Naturally, there's more going on than this: The rise and fall of Saccard — with his sexual adventures, his colonial excursions, his ambiguous relationship with the Church, his half-baked charity work, his frequent Napoleonic analogies, his own private Universal Exposition and his rabid anti-semitism — are clearly supposed to parallel the career of Napoleon III and his corrupt state, for a start.
A nice feature of this book is the way it takes an independent-minded, mature woman, Caroline, as the main viewpoint character. She's a little bit in love with Saccard, but not enough to prevent her seeing through him and maintaining a moderately safe distance.
Not one of the real heavyweights of the series, but still a very interesting novel.
Zola brings back Saccard, the tycoon from 16 books ago in La curée; if you were paying
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attention you'll recall that he is the elder brother of Eugène Rougon, the minister. Saccard seems to have inherited the same bounce-back ability that characterises his brother's career: here, in the mid-1860s, we see him moving rapidly from the collapse of his property empire to a new career in the even murkier world of the stock market, setting up the immodestly-named Banque Universelle to invest in steamships, railways and mines in the Middle East, and using every trick in the book, legal and illegal, to boost the apparent value of the company and its share price. Soon it seems that there isn't a distressed gentlewoman or retired civil servant in France who hasn't put their meagre savings into Universelle stock. Naturally, all the wheeling and dealing and the strange day-to-day workings of the stock market are described in loving detail, as are many other direct and indirect manifestations of money in Second Empire lives, most of which ultimately lead down to the broker in bad debts and blackmailer, Broch. But what Zola is really interested in is not so much the mechanics of finance but the way that people get emotionally involved with money. Saccard is fond of saying that money is like sex: most of the time we chase it for the short-term pleasure and excitement it brings, and sometimes that pursuit is dirty and nasty, but without all that dirt and guilty pleasure we wouldn't produce any children. Saccard is a fraudster who ruins hundreds of people's lives, but the companies financed by his schemes also produce improvements to the quality of life for many others — jobs, transportation, toys for the children in the orphanage. Meanwhile, the communist thinker, Sigismound, produces precisely nothing. Zola isn't quite defending capitalism, but he's at least ambivalent about it. It's pretty clear that he as a novelist would have little to write about in the ideal Marxist world that Sigismound imagines, for a start!
Naturally, there's more going on than this: The rise and fall of Saccard — with his sexual adventures, his colonial excursions, his ambiguous relationship with the Church, his half-baked charity work, his frequent Napoleonic analogies, his own private Universal Exposition and his rabid anti-semitism — are clearly supposed to parallel the career of Napoleon III and his corrupt state, for a start.
A nice feature of this book is the way it takes an independent-minded, mature woman, Caroline, as the main viewpoint character. She's a little bit in love with Saccard, but not enough to prevent her seeing through him and maintaining a moderately safe distance.
Not one of the real heavyweights of the series, but still a very interesting novel.
Show Less
LibraryThing member therebelprince
If only she had the power, she would have destroyed all the money in the world, as one would crush disease underfoot to save the world's health.
Money is a bit of a slog, to be honest, and certainly not Zola at his height. Most of his strengths are still in evidence: a clear-eyed writing style,
Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, has come a long way from the opportunistic young reporter we met in The Fortune of the Rougons, via his rise-fall-rerise which we witnessed in The Kill. Here, he sets about on a grand moneymaking scheme that combines the Second Empire love of gold with their deep desire to support Catholic goals in the face of what many of them saw as barbarism in the Middle East and opportunism from the Jewish community. That rampant French anti-semitism is on full display here, primarily in Saccard himself, who loses his cool primarily when ranting about the Jewish menace. Even he, the great master-manipulator, seems to genuinely believe in his mission for a new Christian paradise in Jerusalem, the dream which brings so many of his investors onboard. (Aside from a single but powerful line of dialogue late in the novel, where Madame Caroline suggests the Jews may be people like the rest of us, apart only because we made them be, Zola leaves it to the reader to appreciate that the anti-semitism is the character's and not the author's. But 19th century French audiences knew, as most of us do still, of Zola's fierce passion for equality and his opposition to anti-semitism, which would emerge in full force only a few years after this novel was published, when the Dreyfus Case took place and he became the voice to expose France's bigoted underbelly.)
Saccard's plan is quite simple, really: overvalue his company shares, buy up some reliable newspapers to promote the stability of the stock, and make use of every connection he has developed in Paris over the past 15 years, to create the ultimate financial windfall which will benefit a great plan of construction in the Near East. Maybe even, in his wildest dreams, recapture the glory of the Silk Road. We are immediately suspicious, as the original audience were intended to be, only here Zola doesn't leave it to chance. From early on, the narrator interrupts his already ominous symbolism to give us clear foreboding that a fall is on the horizon. We are watching a very, very slow car crash, and we are powerless to stop it.
I am a helpless Zola acolyte, but Money is a lesser member of the flock. It is partly the subject matter. It is not that Zola treats economic matters simply; indeed, this is as complex a tapestry as he has ever worked with. But one feels that there are few entry points. One did not have to be a miner to appreciate Germinal or a retailer to appreciate The Ladies' Paradise; he invited us in and gave us all the information in breathtaking detail. Here, the footnotes are having to work overtime to explain concepts of banking and speculation. (Less at fault is the simple issue of historical nuance; the stock exchange in 1860s France is inevitably more removed from us than, say, a story about a love affair.) As always, Zola uses a narrative voice particular to this novel, saturating every page with figures and stock prices. It feels germane and thematically whole, but this is not enough to make it interesting.
The numerous subplots have their moments but the minor characters generally feel like they are somewhat unmoored. Compare this to the peasants of Earth, for example, and much is found wanting. I locate this issue primarily in a development I have noticed in Zola's works immediately preceding this. The author is becoming ever-so-slightly more didactic; he is less patient, less willing to let the reader come to terms with the novel on their own. (Around this time, he was fond of saying he might enter politics once he had finished the Rougon-Macquart; it did not eventuate, but his need to be the old professor would make itself known in his writings late in life.) In the previous novels, the moralising never overwhelmed the story. In Money, however, it feels like every character is a symbol first and a person second. Saccard's two sons both feature: witty, wealthy, bisexual Maxime (whom we met in The Kill) and wolf-like child of the streets Victor (of whom Saccard was unaware until this novel). Yet every time they appear, it is as if they have been experiencing a separate narrative in another novel until Zola remembered them and dragged them back to Money to make another point.
The biggest victim of this symbolic approach, alas, is Madame Caroline herself. Caroline's brother is the co-founder of Saccard's plan although is absent in the Middle East for much of the novel. Caroline gradually becomes Saccard's lover (the exact level of intimacy is left unclear) but she is an educated woman who quickly discerns that not all is above board with the Universal Bank. Frustratingly, after a lovely introductory chapter in which her layers are shaded in, Zola keeps us at a psychological remove from Caroline, as with every other character in the novel, instead simply telling us on occasion that she has become more suspicious and then let it go, showing not telling, in a manner unlike his usual approach. In short, I suppose, my qualm with the novel is that the strings are showing. One supporting character starts out agnostic toward Saccard, develops a reason to hate him, is maneuvered into a position of power that he could one day use against him, and then finally gets the chance. But it never feels authentic or clever; it just seems like the inevitable outcome of a fairytale. And we already had a fairytale with The Dream; we don't need another!
To be fair to Zola, Money eventually softens into an enjoyable narrative. The latter half is better than the first; the latter quarter is better than the three that preceded it. But there's a tough shell to crack just to find what remains of the yolk underneath. As always, though, when he wants to develop a symbol, Zola delivers beyond our wildest dreams. When the novel ends in mid-1869, it becomes clear why Money needed to be one of the volumes in the series, and why it had to come so late. Paris is decimated by a stock crash, a seemingly literal monster child is roaming the streets uncontrolled, the government is making dangerous concessions to its opponents, shipping individual criminals into exile while ignoring the broader systemic issues, and the one man who saw a different way forward for society is dead, his beautiful dreams of a socialist paradise without money having been literally torn up, too weak to compete with the fantasies of those for whom gold is the inevitable master. War is coming, and the Empire - we know - is doomed. But at least, Zola finds in the final pages, there is something about we humans that gives us the bewildering ability to keep hope alive.
Money is a bit of a slog, to be honest, and certainly not Zola at his height. Most of his strengths are still in evidence: a clear-eyed writing style,
Show More
characters deeply at odds with one another while acting entirely in concert with their own biases and world views, gorgeous and expansive passages of symbolism contrasted with intricate moments of character analysis, and an understanding of why systems fail even when individuals are not consciously aiming for them to do so. (A while back, I was describing the series to a removalist mid-move, and he suggested it sounded like 2000s TV series The Wire; in many ways, I think he was right!)Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, has come a long way from the opportunistic young reporter we met in The Fortune of the Rougons, via his rise-fall-rerise which we witnessed in The Kill. Here, he sets about on a grand moneymaking scheme that combines the Second Empire love of gold with their deep desire to support Catholic goals in the face of what many of them saw as barbarism in the Middle East and opportunism from the Jewish community. That rampant French anti-semitism is on full display here, primarily in Saccard himself, who loses his cool primarily when ranting about the Jewish menace. Even he, the great master-manipulator, seems to genuinely believe in his mission for a new Christian paradise in Jerusalem, the dream which brings so many of his investors onboard. (Aside from a single but powerful line of dialogue late in the novel, where Madame Caroline suggests the Jews may be people like the rest of us, apart only because we made them be, Zola leaves it to the reader to appreciate that the anti-semitism is the character's and not the author's. But 19th century French audiences knew, as most of us do still, of Zola's fierce passion for equality and his opposition to anti-semitism, which would emerge in full force only a few years after this novel was published, when the Dreyfus Case took place and he became the voice to expose France's bigoted underbelly.)
Saccard's plan is quite simple, really: overvalue his company shares, buy up some reliable newspapers to promote the stability of the stock, and make use of every connection he has developed in Paris over the past 15 years, to create the ultimate financial windfall which will benefit a great plan of construction in the Near East. Maybe even, in his wildest dreams, recapture the glory of the Silk Road. We are immediately suspicious, as the original audience were intended to be, only here Zola doesn't leave it to chance. From early on, the narrator interrupts his already ominous symbolism to give us clear foreboding that a fall is on the horizon. We are watching a very, very slow car crash, and we are powerless to stop it.
I am a helpless Zola acolyte, but Money is a lesser member of the flock. It is partly the subject matter. It is not that Zola treats economic matters simply; indeed, this is as complex a tapestry as he has ever worked with. But one feels that there are few entry points. One did not have to be a miner to appreciate Germinal or a retailer to appreciate The Ladies' Paradise; he invited us in and gave us all the information in breathtaking detail. Here, the footnotes are having to work overtime to explain concepts of banking and speculation. (Less at fault is the simple issue of historical nuance; the stock exchange in 1860s France is inevitably more removed from us than, say, a story about a love affair.) As always, Zola uses a narrative voice particular to this novel, saturating every page with figures and stock prices. It feels germane and thematically whole, but this is not enough to make it interesting.
The numerous subplots have their moments but the minor characters generally feel like they are somewhat unmoored. Compare this to the peasants of Earth, for example, and much is found wanting. I locate this issue primarily in a development I have noticed in Zola's works immediately preceding this. The author is becoming ever-so-slightly more didactic; he is less patient, less willing to let the reader come to terms with the novel on their own. (Around this time, he was fond of saying he might enter politics once he had finished the Rougon-Macquart; it did not eventuate, but his need to be the old professor would make itself known in his writings late in life.) In the previous novels, the moralising never overwhelmed the story. In Money, however, it feels like every character is a symbol first and a person second. Saccard's two sons both feature: witty, wealthy, bisexual Maxime (whom we met in The Kill) and wolf-like child of the streets Victor (of whom Saccard was unaware until this novel). Yet every time they appear, it is as if they have been experiencing a separate narrative in another novel until Zola remembered them and dragged them back to Money to make another point.
The biggest victim of this symbolic approach, alas, is Madame Caroline herself. Caroline's brother is the co-founder of Saccard's plan although is absent in the Middle East for much of the novel. Caroline gradually becomes Saccard's lover (the exact level of intimacy is left unclear) but she is an educated woman who quickly discerns that not all is above board with the Universal Bank. Frustratingly, after a lovely introductory chapter in which her layers are shaded in, Zola keeps us at a psychological remove from Caroline, as with every other character in the novel, instead simply telling us on occasion that she has become more suspicious and then let it go, showing not telling, in a manner unlike his usual approach. In short, I suppose, my qualm with the novel is that the strings are showing. One supporting character starts out agnostic toward Saccard, develops a reason to hate him, is maneuvered into a position of power that he could one day use against him, and then finally gets the chance. But it never feels authentic or clever; it just seems like the inevitable outcome of a fairytale. And we already had a fairytale with The Dream; we don't need another!
To be fair to Zola, Money eventually softens into an enjoyable narrative. The latter half is better than the first; the latter quarter is better than the three that preceded it. But there's a tough shell to crack just to find what remains of the yolk underneath. As always, though, when he wants to develop a symbol, Zola delivers beyond our wildest dreams. When the novel ends in mid-1869, it becomes clear why Money needed to be one of the volumes in the series, and why it had to come so late. Paris is decimated by a stock crash, a seemingly literal monster child is roaming the streets uncontrolled, the government is making dangerous concessions to its opponents, shipping individual criminals into exile while ignoring the broader systemic issues, and the one man who saw a different way forward for society is dead, his beautiful dreams of a socialist paradise without money having been literally torn up, too weak to compete with the fantasies of those for whom gold is the inevitable master. War is coming, and the Empire - we know - is doomed. But at least, Zola finds in the final pages, there is something about we humans that gives us the bewildering ability to keep hope alive.
Show Less
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1891
Physical description
416 p.; 7.72 inches
ISBN
0199608377 / 9780199608379
Local notes
French title: L'Argent (1891)