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"Sin ought to be an exquisite thing, my dear."

A scathing indictment of Paris during the rise of the Second Empire, Zola here centres his novel around a man driven by power and a woman driven by insatiable desires with a refusal to self-analyse (shades of His Excellency Eugene Rougon). The gorgeous descriptions, running multiple pages at a time, of palatial estates springing up across the city create a banquet so rich it spoils. Zola consciously overwhelms our senses as he examines how the twinned greed of Saccard and Renee exemplifies the grotesque abundance that characterised this era. (Strange, in a way, to imagine him writing this in the period immediately following the Empire.)

As usual with Zola, symbolism is rich and plentiful. The houses are decorated in images of life: fruit and flowers and plants, but which are made of stone, images only of the nature from which they are removed. (At book's end, one character will weep "at not having listened to the voices of the trees".) The "kill" referred to in the novel's title is that which is killed by dogs during a hunt. For each of the main characters, there is a desire to claim that kill - whether it be pleasure, power, money, or something else entirely - but such a goal requires a great sacrifice of one's self.

Zola's obsession with the idea that characteristics and traits are passed down perhaps becomes a bit of a distraction during this novel, especially with the son Maxime who displays worrying (read: bisexual or at least epicene) traits which one feels that the author disdains. And his evident desire to write a novel of the moment, one set in a world with which contemporary readers were familiar, means this novel stretches the brain a little more than, say, The Fortune of the Rougons where only a few footnotes are required to assist with the powerful atmosphere. Here, one gets the sense that the supporting characters are all strongly recognisable types or even direct references - roman a clef - that do not resonate 150 years on.

But that's the dismissive part out of the way. This is an engaging chapter in the ongoing Rougon-Macquart series. The best part is that there was plenty of symbolism even without the author. The boulevards that went up and the complete reconstruction of Paris under the Second Empire were directly political acts. (In Zola, perhaps everything is political.) As Brian Nelson notes in his excellent introduction for the recent Oxford World's Classics edition, they were acts of power - ripping through districts of the poor or disenfranchised, and creating easy avenues for troops to be deployed in the event of an uprising. They were also very much acts of capitalism, both in the way the rich fattened themselves on the spoils, and also in the Paris they created, so much better prepared for the age of "gold and flesh" Zola reflects upon.

Fun fun. ( )

Took me forever to finish this for a bunch of reasons but I'm glad I finally saw it through to the end as it's a fascinating novel that I didn't know how to asssess until the very close. The poisonous love triangle at its core is fascinating and I love the way it weaves into the plot around Aristide Saccard (formerly Rougon, continuing on from the first novel in the cycle)'s property speculations. Renee is a fascinating character, a kind of dissolute dreamer always grasping for something more and yet confined by her stifling surroundings and the meaningless of the spectacle surrounding her, while her chosen love-object (and stepson) Maxime is a curious creation - extremely feminine in appearance and character in a way that would usually be equated with homosexuality in novels of this era, but here is used as a marker for some kind of deeper gendered difference that seems conceived ahead of the time of the novel.

A little drawn out at points and toughgoing, but I'm glad I stuck with it to the end which wrapped things together beautifully and tragically.

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Really difficult read in French, especially because of burnout with long descriptive passages but I'm glad I saw it through - hopefully it'll give me energy to keep going with my reading. ( )

A scuola di amministrazione del bene pubblico (qualcosa di nuovo?).

Come aveva detto felicemente Eugenio Rougon, Parigi si metteva a tavola sognando al dessert una baldoria finale. (70)
( )

This book, La Curée (in English titled as The Kill), the second one in Émile Zola’s Rougon Macquart series, blew me out of my socks because of the topics it frankly deals with in 1871, when it was first published.

I mean: a stepmother and her stepson having a sexual affair, a gay footman having sex with the stableboys, a woman desiring to have sex with two men, a father visiting prostitutes together with his son. And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few more things.

That a novel like this was published during the second half of the nineteenth century is mind blowing. And next to addressing these daring topics, it’s also stunningly well written in a style that keeps you turning the pages.

But what this novel is essentially about, is greed. A man works himself up the ladder to richness and then cannot stop himself from getting more. He goes to lengths to earn more money, making victims (his wife, his friends, the poor) by the dozens. And he gets away with it. His wife, Renee, is also driven by greed, though in her case it’s not money but sex she’s after, and she too has no scruples to get it. In a time when sexual feelings of women were regarded as practically non existent to many men, Zola shows them all wrong. How shocked readers must have been!

A fantastic novel and a must read for lovers of nineteenth or English Victorian novels. I think that in England a book like this would have been unthinkable.