Nana (Oxford World's Classics)

by Douglas Parmée (Editor), Douglas Parmée (Editor), Émile Zola (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.56

  Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siecle moral corruption. The fate of Nana, the Helen of Troy of the Second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir, reduced Flaubert to almost inarticulate gasps of admiration: 'Chapter 14, unsurpassable! ...Yes! ...Christ Almighty! ...Incomparable ...Straight out of Babylon!' Boulevard society is presented with painstaking attention to detail, and Zola's documentation of the contemporary theatrical scene comes directly from his own experience - it was his own failure as a playwright which sent him back to novel-writing and Nana itself. novel-writing and Nana itself. This new translation is an accurate and stylish rendering of Zola's original, which was first published in 1880.

• Used

  Paperback
  1983

  $3.25

• New

  Paperback
  1973

  $11.82

  Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Theatre des Varietes. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Rich men, Comtes and Marquises fall at her feet, great ladies try to emulate her appearance, lovers even kill themselves for her. Nana's hedonistic appetite for luxury and decadent pleasures knows no bounds - until, eventually, it consumes her. Nana provoked outrage on its publication in 1880, with its heroine damned as 'the most crude and bestial sort of whore', yes the language of the novel makes Nana almost a mythical figure: a destructive force preying on a corrupt society.