3 best books by Émile Zola

Read to Zola, approaching his work, it turns out to be a guided tour in a literary museum where portraits of the most particular reality of the characters are exhibited as well as the most evident and palpable social reality, that of any person who could be taken as the protagonist in order of, simply, momentarily occupying another soul from the calmest to the most violent.

Émile Zola cultivated the short story, the story, the dramaturgy and the essay. The necessary galvanizer of such varied creations has always been the commitment to naturalism, a kind of empirical reflection of human reality, a testimony in the key of fiction where the only fiction can be the random name of the characters. The ultimate goal of this proposal, of which Zola was his bulwark, was none other than an intention to return the balance between the human being, his existence, his environment.

This movement and this narrative intention make sense after the various political movements and conflicts (Industrial Revolution included) that were closing the XNUMXth century. Returning the human being to its most basic and integrated aspect seemed a necessary task in the face of alienation, loss of faith and war.

Put like that, naturalism may seem like a tedious thing, an ultra-realistic flat tale. But the grace is precisely in demonstrating the opposite. In the small of the experience of a character, Zola extracted the sublime of living, of existing.

3 Recommended Novels by Émile Zola

The human beast

Or how demons can end up emerging, breaking through the wall of appearances and the assumption of conventions. Story about the murderer subjected to practically genetic dictates, destiny as an atrocious roulette wheel of bad fortune.

Summary: Jacques Lantier, lonely and misogynistic locomotive engineer, falls in love with Sévérine, the wife of stationmaster Roubaud. This crude tale of murder, passion and possession is the seventeenth novel of the 20 published by Émile Zola under the generic title Les Rougon-Macquart.

Zola reels a crude portrait of the human condition; a compassionate study of how individuals can become derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control.

The work powerfully evokes the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to rush into the future like the new locomotives and railways it built. Zola reminds us that under the veneer of technological progress, the beast that we carry always remains. The novel has been made into a film by directors of the stature of Jean Renoir or Fritz Lang.

The human beast

Work

A strictly literary reading offers us a refreshing glimpse of the possible utopia, of equality and balance as a necessary and achievable good.

Summary: Written in 1901, shortly before the death of the great French novelist, it has become a kind of literary and political testament. Literary, because Zola challenged, in this novel, the new spiritualist tendencies; political, because it advocated utopia.

Zola describes in Work the culmination of the revolutionary process that he had sketched in Germinal, the great novel that appeared in 1885. The present time of Work is that it presents another alternative to the one today proclaimed, by capitalism, the end of History.

Work also raises the problem of whether or not utopia is novelizable. Or in other words, if novels can continue to be written in a social state without injustice or human tension. And those who maintain that naturalism was a pessimistic aesthetic will find in this novel an incontestable refutation. Because naturalism, as Work shows, tended to transform the world in a positive sense.

Work by Zola

The work

Total miscegenation of the literary and the pictorial. When Zola was already in the twilight of his life, he began to see in the new pictorial currents a follow-up to his initiated naturalism.

The reality in its right colors, under a detailed subjectivity of the artist, towards a replica of the world under the worlds of anyone who knows how to find beauty, color and optimism.

Summary: Émile Zola's great novel about the beginnings of impressionism. The work is undoubtedly the most autobiographical novel by Zola, the founder of French naturalism and one of the most widely read novelists of the XNUMXth century. Drawing inspiration from her own relationship with Paul Cézanne, whom she met as children, Zola tells the story of a painter who struggles to be recognized in Parisian art circles.

The work captures, with great vividness, the creative maelstrom of Paris, the core of the intellectual and artistic bohemianism that would illuminate Impressionism.

Zola's work
5/5 - (10 votes)

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