Zola: Germinal (Everyman's Library (Paper))

by EmileZola (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.38

  Written by Zola(1840-1902),the leading figure in the French school of Naturalistic fiction,GERMINAL (1885) is the compelling portrait of life in a mining community.The title of the novel refers back to a turbulent period of history,an era of violent change and expected renewal,and the novel itself is the thirteenth ofa twenty-volume series known as 'Rougon-Macquart'series after the names of rhe main branches,one legitimate,the othe illegitimate,of a single family.Gervaise Macquart,whose unhappy tale is told in L'ASSOMMOIR,is the mother of the hero in GERMINAL,Etienne.Etienne is a political figure as well as a compelling psychological study.Through him Zola examines the problems of industrial strife and traces the growing influence of socialism and anarchism.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.38

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $12.25

  Considered by Andre Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in northern France under the second empire. At the centre of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a handsome 21 year-old mechanic, intelligent but with little education and a dangerous predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage. Germinal tells the parallel story of Etienne's refusal to accept what he appears destined to become, and of the miners' difficult decision to strike in order to fight for a better standard of life.