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Available
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Publication
Penguin Classics (2004), Paperback, 480 pages
Description
Regarded by critics as one of the highest pinnacles of achievement in Emile Zola's literary career, L'Assommoir (best translated as "the cheap liquor store") offers an unflinching look at alcoholism among the working class in nineteenth-century France. Part of a larger, 20-volume story cycle that spanned Zola's entire career, L'Assommoir was the novel that initially propelled the writer to fame and fortune.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Smiler69
Zola can't be said to be synonymous with light reading, and this novel in particular is probably one of the bleakest in the Rougon-Macquart twenty-novel series, though also one of the most memorable and hard to put down. Gervaise Maquart is only twenty-two years old at the start of the novel. She
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is living in a hovel with her two small boys and her lover Lantier, the father of her children, who takes every cent she makes and at the first opportunity leaves them all to their own devices and takes up with another woman. Gervaise, with her willingness to work hard as a washerwoman manages to pull through and for a while resists the advances of Coupeau, a roofer and a neighbour of hers who professes his love for her and begs her to marry him with every chance he gets. Gervaise is understandably mistrustful of men, but she eventually gives in and agrees to the marriage; Coupeau after all is a hard worker and unlike Lantier, is also a teetotaller, and she is hopeful that they can have a good family life; after all, all she wishes for in life is to have food to eat every day, a clean place to live and not to be beaten by her man. The couple works hard and manages to put aside enough savings so that eventually, Gervaise is able to realize another of her dreams and opens her own laundry business. For a number of years, there are good times to be had by all, until Coupeau has a bad fall. Encouraged by Gervaise to take his time to recuperate from a badly broken leg, Coupeau takes to spending all his time with his former work friends, who like to hang out in drinking holes, and he eventually turns to drink himself. The second half of the novel describes the couple's slow but steady decline into alcoholism and debauchery. Though very bleak, Zola has peopled the novel with a cast of fascinating characters, among whom are the Lorilleux couple, composed of Coupeau's sister and her husband. These two take an instant dislike to the young woman and are blinded by their envy and avarice which makes them hate Gervaise's success all the more and then celebrate her decline with glee. The couple's daughter Nana is also introduced, she of the eponymous 9th novel in the series, who shortly after her sixteenth year runs away from her parent's debauchery only to land in a mess of her own making. This is a stinging portrayal of the horrors of alcoholism and of the victims it leaves behind. It exposes harsh realities and shocking violence, even by today's standards, but the reward is a fascinating story extremely well told. Show Less
LibraryThing member japaul22
[L'Assomoir] follows the hard, sad life of Gervaise from her arrival in Paris at age 18 with her partner, Lantier, and their two young boys (yes, she had her first child at 14!) through her death. I don't consider it a spoiler to say that things don't work out well for Gervaise - you can sense
When Lantier leaves Gervaise for another woman, Gervaise buckles down and gets a job as a laundress to feed herself and her boys (one of which is Etienne, the main character in [Germinal]). She meets Coupeau who hounds her until she marries him. He is a good person, hard worker, and doesn't drink so she finally gives in. They have a good life until an accident at work sends Coupeau and subsequently Gervaise into a tailspin. They descend to the lowest of the low and lets just say things do not end well.
This is my second book by Zola and it was, again, an amazing reading experience. Zola creates great characters (I especially loved the despicable, leeching Lantier) and has amazing descriptive ability. He is able to characterize not only the people in his books but also the settings.
I didn't see myself ever reading all of the Rougon-Macquart series, but after reading just these two, I'm already considering it. I thought it was really interesting to see the early life of Etienne and how it would have influenced him. And I believe one of the books focuses on Nana, child of Gervaise and Coupeau and I'd really like to read that one after seeing her childhood in this book.
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immediately that the world she lives in is too hard and unforgiving for her life to turn out well. When Lantier leaves Gervaise for another woman, Gervaise buckles down and gets a job as a laundress to feed herself and her boys (one of which is Etienne, the main character in [Germinal]). She meets Coupeau who hounds her until she marries him. He is a good person, hard worker, and doesn't drink so she finally gives in. They have a good life until an accident at work sends Coupeau and subsequently Gervaise into a tailspin. They descend to the lowest of the low and lets just say things do not end well.
This is my second book by Zola and it was, again, an amazing reading experience. Zola creates great characters (I especially loved the despicable, leeching Lantier) and has amazing descriptive ability. He is able to characterize not only the people in his books but also the settings.
I didn't see myself ever reading all of the Rougon-Macquart series, but after reading just these two, I'm already considering it. I thought it was really interesting to see the early life of Etienne and how it would have influenced him. And I believe one of the books focuses on Nana, child of Gervaise and Coupeau and I'd really like to read that one after seeing her childhood in this book.
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LibraryThing member jasonlf
I used to think that Bernard Malamud's The Fixer was the most relentlessly bleak and depressing book because it went from bad to worse to much worse over the course of the novel. But L'Assommoir (translated here as The Drinking Den) beats it because it has short interludes of slightly better that
L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.
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make the overall trend that much more painful. It is a little didactic and mono-thematic (drinking is bad for poor people, really really bad), but it centers around one extraordinary character (Gervaise Coupeau), has smaller parts for two extraordinary girls (her daughter Nana who becomes a prostitute at age 15 and her next door neighbor Lalie, who watches her mother get beaten to death by her alcoholic father and eventually succumbs to the same fate herself), and has some amazing set-pieces, including a trip to the Louvre by Gervaise's wedding party and what must be one of the most memorably described dinner parties in literature.L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.
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LibraryThing member thorold
The seventh book in the cycle follows Gervaise, a young woman from the Macquart side of the family, who works as a laundress and has moved from Provence to Paris with her unreliable man, the hatter Lantier, and their two young sons. When we first meet her, Lantier is in the process of pawning all
If you'd been a 19th century French reader following the publication of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle in real time, you'd already have been aware by 1877 that you had to be ready for anyhting, and there was no knowing what he would do next. All the same, L'Assommoir must have been a shock. Thanks to Dickens and others, there were plenty of novels about poverty, the evils of gin, exploitation and debt. But they were always novels written from a safely middle-class viewpoint: most of the time the central character found himself in the slums as a result of malice or mistaken identity and was rescued by a generous benefactor as soon as his true identity came out, and invariably the narrative voice was that of an educated, respectable middle-class person who knew where to stop to avoid shocking his readers.
Zola, of course, is a writer who has rarely been suspected of knowing where to stop. In this case, he took an approach that now seems absolutely obvious, but must have been alarming to contemporaries: he gave his omniscient third-person narrator a descriptive voice using a very slightly more grammatical version of the same coarse Parisian argot that his characters spoke in. We're not allowed to take a step back into our safe, middle-class world: we have to see his characters from their own perspective, bounded by their own fears and ambitions. And it's not a very pleasant place to be. Work is miserable and ill-rewarded; the limited amount of fun you can have is always undermined by the knowledge that it's costing you money you can't afford; saving and hard work can give you a better life, but the least accident will upset all your plans and send you back down to the bottom again. And don't even think about getting old unless you have children who are earning well enough to keep you.
The raw language is one of the chief pleasures of this book, and we get fewer than usual of Zola's lush descriptions (plenty of descriptions of lushes, though!). But the restricted vocabulary he imposes on himself doesn't stop him giving us a couple of unforgettable backdrops - the steamy laundry (setting for a ludicrously erotic water-fight in the opening chapter), the forge, the squalid apartment building where most of the characters live, and of course the gin-palace, the Assommoir of the title, with its bubbling still in the background. And a couple of very memorable parties, but also lots of painfully graphic descriptions of the kind of behaviour that poverty, desperation and gin can lead people into, culminating in the scary scenes of Gervaise's husband dying in delirium tremens in the lunatic asylum.
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their remaining belongings in order to run off with another woman. By hard graft, Gervaise gets out of that mess, and several further ones, but each time she gets knocked back down her will to survive is progressively lessened, and the short-term pleasures of drink start to look more appealling.If you'd been a 19th century French reader following the publication of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle in real time, you'd already have been aware by 1877 that you had to be ready for anyhting, and there was no knowing what he would do next. All the same, L'Assommoir must have been a shock. Thanks to Dickens and others, there were plenty of novels about poverty, the evils of gin, exploitation and debt. But they were always novels written from a safely middle-class viewpoint: most of the time the central character found himself in the slums as a result of malice or mistaken identity and was rescued by a generous benefactor as soon as his true identity came out, and invariably the narrative voice was that of an educated, respectable middle-class person who knew where to stop to avoid shocking his readers.
Zola, of course, is a writer who has rarely been suspected of knowing where to stop. In this case, he took an approach that now seems absolutely obvious, but must have been alarming to contemporaries: he gave his omniscient third-person narrator a descriptive voice using a very slightly more grammatical version of the same coarse Parisian argot that his characters spoke in. We're not allowed to take a step back into our safe, middle-class world: we have to see his characters from their own perspective, bounded by their own fears and ambitions. And it's not a very pleasant place to be. Work is miserable and ill-rewarded; the limited amount of fun you can have is always undermined by the knowledge that it's costing you money you can't afford; saving and hard work can give you a better life, but the least accident will upset all your plans and send you back down to the bottom again. And don't even think about getting old unless you have children who are earning well enough to keep you.
The raw language is one of the chief pleasures of this book, and we get fewer than usual of Zola's lush descriptions (plenty of descriptions of lushes, though!). But the restricted vocabulary he imposes on himself doesn't stop him giving us a couple of unforgettable backdrops - the steamy laundry (setting for a ludicrously erotic water-fight in the opening chapter), the forge, the squalid apartment building where most of the characters live, and of course the gin-palace, the Assommoir of the title, with its bubbling still in the background. And a couple of very memorable parties, but also lots of painfully graphic descriptions of the kind of behaviour that poverty, desperation and gin can lead people into, culminating in the scary scenes of Gervaise's husband dying in delirium tremens in the lunatic asylum.
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LibraryThing member bluepiano
Gervaise comes to Paris with her lover and their two children. Lantier, her partner, deserts her but she soon drifts into marriage with a solid workingman. All goes smoothly until this husband, Coupeau, is injured on the job. Good-hearted Gervaise nurses him back to health though not back to work
A couple of things that interest me about the story are Gervaise's tragic flaw and Zola's scheme. Gervaise has ambition and spirit, but what ultimately drags her down is nothing more her willingness to go with the flow. Neither she nor any of the other characters is wicked or altogether intolerable (except for the dreadul Lalie); their failings are not on a grand scale. Nor do Zola's notions of the primacy of heredity need to be used to account for these people's foibles. The environment of poverty he describes is sufficient for that.
There are despite the bleakness comic scenes and characters (Mme Lerat, e.g., who though brooking no obscenities manages to find a salacious meaning in the most innocent of remarks). And though I usually merely tolerate descriptive passages, Zola's descriptions bring an immediacy and sensuality that no one else's do. I loathe over-heated rooms and the smell of meat cooking, but how I long to be at that name-day feast; I've no interest in 19th-century laundry techniques and I dislike violence, but Zola makes me want to stand at that laundry door and watch the women washing and brawling; I'm not given to fondling teenagers, but golly, Nana sounds squeezable. After finishing the book I looked up into a bright autumnal sky and felt a tiny bit of what it must be to be cold and starving and looking up into a yellow dusk over a city with the smell of snow in the air.
I've read L'assomoir four or five times and still I enjoy and admire it enormously. Please give it a try.
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but still, through the good graces of an infatuated neighbour, she acquires her own business. She is successful--to her neighbours' envy--but at the acme of her happiness Lantier reappears and gradually her life falls into decline.A couple of things that interest me about the story are Gervaise's tragic flaw and Zola's scheme. Gervaise has ambition and spirit, but what ultimately drags her down is nothing more her willingness to go with the flow. Neither she nor any of the other characters is wicked or altogether intolerable (except for the dreadul Lalie); their failings are not on a grand scale. Nor do Zola's notions of the primacy of heredity need to be used to account for these people's foibles. The environment of poverty he describes is sufficient for that.
There are despite the bleakness comic scenes and characters (Mme Lerat, e.g., who though brooking no obscenities manages to find a salacious meaning in the most innocent of remarks). And though I usually merely tolerate descriptive passages, Zola's descriptions bring an immediacy and sensuality that no one else's do. I loathe over-heated rooms and the smell of meat cooking, but how I long to be at that name-day feast; I've no interest in 19th-century laundry techniques and I dislike violence, but Zola makes me want to stand at that laundry door and watch the women washing and brawling; I'm not given to fondling teenagers, but golly, Nana sounds squeezable. After finishing the book I looked up into a bright autumnal sky and felt a tiny bit of what it must be to be cold and starving and looking up into a yellow dusk over a city with the smell of snow in the air.
I've read L'assomoir four or five times and still I enjoy and admire it enormously. Please give it a try.
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LibraryThing member gbill
The theme of “L’Assommoir” is the destructive influence of alcoholism; the title was a colloquial term in 19th century Paris referring to a shop selling cheap liquor distilled on its premises.
When it was published, the book was controversial all around: it wasn’t clear to his contemporaries
In this story Gervaise, a poor laundress, is used and abused first by Lantier, who abandons her, and then later by Coupeau, a roofer whose decline into alcoholism begins with an injury on the job. Gervaise tries to hold it all together, but eventually debt and the corruption and chaos around her drive her to drink as well. Nana, the child she’s had by Coupeau, runs away for Paris, and is used by Zola to illustrate one of his central theories, that of the destructive and fatalistic curse of heredity.
L’Assommoir is certainly worth reading but I found it less effective than the other books I have read from the Rougon-Macquart series, whose images to me are more indelible: the coal miners in Germinal, murder and violence in La Bete Humaine, and lust in Nana.
Quotes:
On art, from the memorable scene where the wedding party visits the Louvre:
“Next the party embarked on the long gallery which houses paintings of the Italian and Flemish schools. More pictures, and still more pictures, of saints, of men and women whose faces meant nothing to them, of very dark landscapes, of animals gone yellow, a confusion of people and things in such a busy riot of colours that everyone was beginning to get a nasty headache.”
And:
“He strode directly over to Rubens’ Kermesse. There, still saying nothing, he simply rolled his eyes salaciously in the direction of the picture. The ladies, when they’d got right up close, gave little shrieks then looked away, scarlet in the face. But their menfolk, sniggering, made them stay with them while they searched the canvas for smutty details.”
On chance:
“Her dream was to live with decent people, because if you’re with bad people, she said, it was like being hit on the head, it bashed your brains in, it smashed you flat in two shakes if you were a woman. She came out in a cold sweat when she thought about the future, saying she felt like a coin someone had tossed in the air that might land heads or tails depending on how the pavement lay.”
On morality:
“The thought of this affair and of the pleasures her sister-in-law must be enjoying exasperated her still more: she had an ugly woman’s regard for respectability.”
On politics, I love this one:
“You’re a lot of babes in arms, getting that excited over politics! … Politics is nothin’ but big joke! What difference does it make to folks like us? … Let ‘em have anyone they fancy, a king, an emperor, nothin’ at all, it won’t stop me earnin’ me five francs, an eatin’ an’ sleepin’, now will it?...”
On sex:
“He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He wasn’t touching, he was just looking. Was he forbidden now to look at the lovely things the good Lord had made? That tart Clemence hadn’t half got an amazing pair of knockers! She could put herself on show and charge a couple of sous a feel, it’d be cheap at the price!”
When it was published, the book was controversial all around: it wasn’t clear to his contemporaries
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whether Zola was a socialist or whether he had painted so unflattering a picture of the working class that he was providing conservatives with evidence that they were unfit to vote. Zola may have presented the darker sides of human nature and could be accused of exaggerating, but his goal was to present life as it is, stating that this was “the first novel about the common people that does not lie”. He also said “my novels refuse to come to any conclusions because I believe that it’s not the business of the artist to do so.”In this story Gervaise, a poor laundress, is used and abused first by Lantier, who abandons her, and then later by Coupeau, a roofer whose decline into alcoholism begins with an injury on the job. Gervaise tries to hold it all together, but eventually debt and the corruption and chaos around her drive her to drink as well. Nana, the child she’s had by Coupeau, runs away for Paris, and is used by Zola to illustrate one of his central theories, that of the destructive and fatalistic curse of heredity.
L’Assommoir is certainly worth reading but I found it less effective than the other books I have read from the Rougon-Macquart series, whose images to me are more indelible: the coal miners in Germinal, murder and violence in La Bete Humaine, and lust in Nana.
Quotes:
On art, from the memorable scene where the wedding party visits the Louvre:
“Next the party embarked on the long gallery which houses paintings of the Italian and Flemish schools. More pictures, and still more pictures, of saints, of men and women whose faces meant nothing to them, of very dark landscapes, of animals gone yellow, a confusion of people and things in such a busy riot of colours that everyone was beginning to get a nasty headache.”
And:
“He strode directly over to Rubens’ Kermesse. There, still saying nothing, he simply rolled his eyes salaciously in the direction of the picture. The ladies, when they’d got right up close, gave little shrieks then looked away, scarlet in the face. But their menfolk, sniggering, made them stay with them while they searched the canvas for smutty details.”
On chance:
“Her dream was to live with decent people, because if you’re with bad people, she said, it was like being hit on the head, it bashed your brains in, it smashed you flat in two shakes if you were a woman. She came out in a cold sweat when she thought about the future, saying she felt like a coin someone had tossed in the air that might land heads or tails depending on how the pavement lay.”
On morality:
“The thought of this affair and of the pleasures her sister-in-law must be enjoying exasperated her still more: she had an ugly woman’s regard for respectability.”
On politics, I love this one:
“You’re a lot of babes in arms, getting that excited over politics! … Politics is nothin’ but big joke! What difference does it make to folks like us? … Let ‘em have anyone they fancy, a king, an emperor, nothin’ at all, it won’t stop me earnin’ me five francs, an eatin’ an’ sleepin’, now will it?...”
On sex:
“He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He wasn’t touching, he was just looking. Was he forbidden now to look at the lovely things the good Lord had made? That tart Clemence hadn’t half got an amazing pair of knockers! She could put herself on show and charge a couple of sous a feel, it’d be cheap at the price!”
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LibraryThing member Lisahgolden
Absinthe and abject poverty are not your friend.
LibraryThing member cdeuker
Grim book, also known as L'Assamoir. Lower class Parisian life--all ruined by brutality brought on, in large part, by alcoholism. Gervaise is the heroine. For a time she seems the bright light who will escape through work and inner fortitude, but she succumbs as well. Pathetic child of a neighbor
Read July 2009
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(drunken, of course) is beaten to death by her father.Read July 2009
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LibraryThing member GeorgeBowling
This is a book which works, though in many ways it should not. It is very long, very detailed, very schematic. But you get involved. The characters sometimes threaten to become cyphers, but it is hard not to be symathetic. The great climactic chapter towards the end where the hopeless starving
This was apparently the book that made Zola a sensation. It was deserved.
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alcoholic Gervaise wanders the streets of Paris attempting to sell herself for a bite to eat is heart wrenching.This was apparently the book that made Zola a sensation. It was deserved.
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LibraryThing member Lisahgolden
Absinthe and abject poverty are not your friend.
LibraryThing member BookAddict
A terribly tragic and horrible story of the increasing degradation and poverty of a working class family. Accounts of terrible physical and mental abuse.
The son Etienne in this family is the main character of Zola's Germinal, the son Claude is the main character of Zola's The Masterpiece, and the
Zola is a master of depicting the realities of poverty and he hasn't failed to do this in this novel. His descriptions of alcohol toxicity and death are outstanding. The most difficult sections to read were depicting the horrific abuse by a father of his young innocent daughter.
An excellent novel. Not recommended for those who don't like uncomfortable topics, death, poverty, or abuse scenes.
The son Etienne in this family is the main character of Zola's Germinal, the son Claude is the main character of Zola's The Masterpiece, and the
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daughter Nana is the main character in Zola's Nana. Zola is a master of depicting the realities of poverty and he hasn't failed to do this in this novel. His descriptions of alcohol toxicity and death are outstanding. The most difficult sections to read were depicting the horrific abuse by a father of his young innocent daughter.
An excellent novel. Not recommended for those who don't like uncomfortable topics, death, poverty, or abuse scenes.
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LibraryThing member hbergander
Novel against the background of the French-German War of 1870-71, depicting the sad reality of common soldiers and the suffering of the civil population, hit by economic hardship. After having read this novel I understood the problem of the Franco-German hostility, which has lasted a hundred years.
LibraryThing member Stbalbach
The seventh volume in the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle of 20 novels. Along with 'Nana' and 'Germinal' it is probably his most famous. It is also his most controversial, outraging many contemporary conservative critics with NSFW language and portrayals of sex and violence - the perversion of pre-teen
The novel is notoriously difficult to translate. Indeed, even the contemporary native French version needed translations since many of the words and phrases were localized slang unfamiliar to many people. The Margaret Mauldon (Oxford World's Classics) is the most recent translation and reads beautifully, if not a little 19th Century British cockney.
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Nana is treated frankly for example. The minute level and accurate detail of working class 19th century Parisian life remains a study for anthropologists to this day.The novel is notoriously difficult to translate. Indeed, even the contemporary native French version needed translations since many of the words and phrases were localized slang unfamiliar to many people. The Margaret Mauldon (Oxford World's Classics) is the most recent translation and reads beautifully, if not a little 19th Century British cockney.
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LibraryThing member wbwilburn5
Love this book, a lesson on self-destruction written in the most interesting, loving way. I have lost count of how many times I have re-read this novel.
LibraryThing member nosajeel
I used to think that Bernard Malamud's The Fixer was the most relentlessly bleak and depressing book because it went from bad to worse to much worse over the course of the novel. But L'Assommoir (translated here as The Drinking Den) beats it because it has short interludes of slightly better that
L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.
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make the overall trend that much more painful. It is a little didactic and mono-thematic (drinking is bad for poor people, really really bad), but it centers around one extraordinary character (Gervaise Coupeau), has smaller parts for two extraordinary girls (her daughter Nana who becomes a prostitute at age 15 and her next door neighbor Lalie, who watches her mother get beaten to death by her alcoholic father and eventually succumbs to the same fate herself), and has some amazing set-pieces, including a trip to the Louvre by Gervaise's wedding party and what must be one of the most memorably described dinner parties in literature.L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.
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LibraryThing member BayardUS
At one point while reading this book I accidentally skipped fifty pages, and didn't realize it for a significant period of time because the story felt exactly the same. Needless to say, this isn't a good sign, but strangely it's more forgivable here than it would be in most other works because of
By my reckoning Zola is trying to do three main things with this L'Assommoir:
First, he's trying to write the story of Gervaise, a poor laundry woman, and her fall,
Second, he's trying to paint a portrait of how the other half lived in mid-1800s Paris,
Third, he's trying to write a morality tale denouncing hard alcohol.
In practice Zola's efforts to accomplish his second and third goal undermine his first. Because he is trying to paint a portrait of the life of the urban French underclass, Zola lavishes on the descriptions and the asides, which has the effect of drawing out the book and killing the pacing of Gervaise's story. Also, because he is trying to write a tale about the harms of hard alcohol, Gervaise's story quickly becomes predictable. A predictable story that drags on is hard-pressed to be compelling, and indeed without a strong, compelling central story L'Assommoir becomes a bit of a slog. Zola does give a great look at everyday French life of that period, as he always does, but that isn't enough to overcome the flaws created in the main narrative by Zola's divergent purposes.
Beyond these structural flaws L'Assommoir also has problems drawing consistent and believable characters. Gervaise's character traits seem to shift in order to conveniently allow Zola to make her descent as dramatic as possible- in one chapter she'll be a hard worker while a few chapters later she's letting everything slide without a sufficient explanation. Other characters also fail to be believable, like the character Lalie and her abusive alcoholic father. They don't read as real, but as mere caricatures of a saintly child and a beastly abusive drunk. Segments featuring these characters are emotionally effective, but not well done (it's the literary equivalent of showing footage of someone kicking a puppy: it's always going to get people to feel something, but it doesn't take any skill to get that effect). Zola also fails to present the symptoms of alcoholism in a believable way, certain symptoms seem to arise to that Zola can lament them for a chapter, before they are ignored for an extended period of time. It felt like Zola wanted to point the symptoms out but also wanted them to disappear before they could interfere with his pre-planned narrative. This book doesn't serve as a good description or indictment of alcoholism (for that read Under the Volcano), instead it reads like a horror tale intended to scare people straight.
I've probably harped too much on this books flaws. It certainly has bad points, but it's not a bad book. It just isn't very good. Germinal was better, and didn't have a simplistic moral message shoehorned in. I plan on reading more Zola in the future, specifically some of his later works, in hopes that he continued to improve with age and moved beyond moralizing.
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what Zola is trying to do with this book. Unfortunately, Zola's goals for this book end up working at cross purposes, the outcome being a work that's less than stellar.By my reckoning Zola is trying to do three main things with this L'Assommoir:
First, he's trying to write the story of Gervaise, a poor laundry woman, and her fall,
Second, he's trying to paint a portrait of how the other half lived in mid-1800s Paris,
Third, he's trying to write a morality tale denouncing hard alcohol.
In practice Zola's efforts to accomplish his second and third goal undermine his first. Because he is trying to paint a portrait of the life of the urban French underclass, Zola lavishes on the descriptions and the asides, which has the effect of drawing out the book and killing the pacing of Gervaise's story. Also, because he is trying to write a tale about the harms of hard alcohol, Gervaise's story quickly becomes predictable. A predictable story that drags on is hard-pressed to be compelling, and indeed without a strong, compelling central story L'Assommoir becomes a bit of a slog. Zola does give a great look at everyday French life of that period, as he always does, but that isn't enough to overcome the flaws created in the main narrative by Zola's divergent purposes.
Beyond these structural flaws L'Assommoir also has problems drawing consistent and believable characters. Gervaise's character traits seem to shift in order to conveniently allow Zola to make her descent as dramatic as possible- in one chapter she'll be a hard worker while a few chapters later she's letting everything slide without a sufficient explanation. Other characters also fail to be believable, like the character Lalie and her abusive alcoholic father. They don't read as real, but as mere caricatures of a saintly child and a beastly abusive drunk. Segments featuring these characters are emotionally effective, but not well done (it's the literary equivalent of showing footage of someone kicking a puppy: it's always going to get people to feel something, but it doesn't take any skill to get that effect). Zola also fails to present the symptoms of alcoholism in a believable way, certain symptoms seem to arise to that Zola can lament them for a chapter, before they are ignored for an extended period of time. It felt like Zola wanted to point the symptoms out but also wanted them to disappear before they could interfere with his pre-planned narrative. This book doesn't serve as a good description or indictment of alcoholism (for that read Under the Volcano), instead it reads like a horror tale intended to scare people straight.
I've probably harped too much on this books flaws. It certainly has bad points, but it's not a bad book. It just isn't very good. Germinal was better, and didn't have a simplistic moral message shoehorned in. I plan on reading more Zola in the future, specifically some of his later works, in hopes that he continued to improve with age and moved beyond moralizing.
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LibraryThing member Kristelh
The 7th edition of the Les Rougon-Macquart series. The book is about a family living in Paris during the time Napoleon III trying to survive as middle class. Zola gives us a picture of this family using naturalism. You will experience Paris with all your senses from the perspective of this man and
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woman and how the tavern contributed to their experience. The book might appeal to those that like historical significance and epic books about family. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1877
Physical description
480 p.; 5.16 inches
ISBN
014044954X / 9780140449549
Local notes
French title: L'Assommoir (1877). Also translated The Dram Shop. The Gin Palace. The Drunkard
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