les rougon-macquart book 1: La Fortune des Rougon ~
i have been sick since saturday and sorta out of it.
the good side is that i have spent a lot of time at home reading. the bad side is that i've done very little else.
i have begun the enormous task of reading Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series. i originally worried that it would be a somewhat plodding reading to return to outmoded French naturalism/realism after so much stephen king, but the truth is, i have slipped back into the 19th century milieu without much fuss at all. part of that is just how wonderful a writer Zola is, and how "modern" he plays to the ears of even the 21st century. there have seriously been moments during the first two books that were as lurid and challenging as anything you might find on the literary shelves today (one line about a butler who is after the stable boys I had to read several times because i thought my fever had induced some sort of hallucination).
i won't report in depth on this series, but i do want to list the books along the way and provide a few notes. i even created a "zola" tag.
The first in the series, The Fortune of the Rougons, is an interesting introduction to the whole roman fleuve. it establishes the family lines of all the major characters who will follow (and does so brilliantly, i might add ~ so many other books i need a chart just to keep track, but somehow everyone here seems so clearly delineated). it's a general testament to Zola's work that the writing is so positively effortless. i understand very little about french history and politics (which is one of the reasons i am reading this series), but suddenly things are becoming very clear to me.
the plot of the first book surrounds the Coup d'Etat of 1851 after which Napoleon III was restored to the throne. this major turning point in the country is viewed through the eyes of the Rougon family, which is split not only politically, but socially (one child of Tante Dide is legitimate, while the other two are bastards, which causes no end of strife). The family lives in Plassans, a fictional country town based on Aix-en-Provence. The legitimate son, Pierre Rougon, is ambitious and wants wealth and power. He knows aligning himself with the Empire will be the doorway to that ambition. The illegitimate son, Antoine Macquart, wants to overthrow the wealthy and sides with the Republic. Zola takes no sides in this argument: both characters are shown to be cowardly opportunists and in many ways the whole novel is a farce (and actually quite funny). the third child, an illegitimate daughter named Ursule steers wide of both parties (disowning both the Rougons and the Macquarts), but her young son Silvere is an idealistic Republican who gets swept up into the army in the midst of the fray.
what's not funny is that the violence of the Coup d'Etat is very real and good people of pure ideals get caught up and destroyed by it. The ending of the book is kind of a downer and leaves you wondering who "won" since the only people of moral fiber worth rooting for are very very dead.
nevertheless, it's a great intro ~ and leaves the door wide open to see how these characters are going to fare in the Second Empire ~ a period of wealth and excess and debauchery, but also a period of gross appropriations, poverty, and political abuse (fun!). even more exciting is that we know something Zola didn't when he began writing the series: all of this polarization will come to a crashing bloodletting in 1873.
anyway, the first book is a good start: plenty of intrigues, scandals, and characters that make your head spin with their machinations. i'm into book three already, so i will tell you a little about the second book tomorrow and hopefully catch up before i fall too much behind.