The Earth

The connection to the Rougon - Macquart series is Jean Macquart (the brother of Gervaise from "L'Assommoir"), but even though he is the main character in that respect "The Earth" is about so much more. Mainly the human condition told through the lives of the townsfolk and farmers of Beauce. Jealousy, murder, rape, farting, love, blasphemy, birth, longing, violence, cursing, sex it's all here...even a belligerent puking donkey! Yes, Zola's storytelling can sometimes be shocking bordering on vulgar, but so is life. A masterpiece.

You'll find all five in abundance in this book, I kid you not! I love Zola, and I'm trying to get through all the Rougon-Macquart series. For those of you that don't know, Zola wrote a 20-novel saga about a family under the Second Empire. So far I have read about six. They are all thrilling, exciting, lurid, and wonderful. This one is no exception. It is amazing and I loved it, although it was my least favorite so far among the Zola books I have read so far. (However, in its defense, it was undoubtedly the dirtiest!) The main character is one Jean Macquart, really a very nice and ordinary guy (later to fight in the Franco-Prussian war in Zola's The Debacle, the penultimate of the Rougon-Macquart, which I'm reading now) who becomes a farm hand in the most perverse, twisted peasant village you could ever imagine. Why is this my least favorite Zola novel so far? Because it's very hard to care about the characters, whereas in some of his other books, such as "L'Assommoir", featuring Jean Macquart's sister Gervaise, or "Germinal", featuring Gervaise's son and Jean's nephew Etienne, the characters were sympathetic and the stories tragic. But almost no one was sympathetic in this book except for Jean. The evil characters were so awful you could barely read about them. I can't give away all the plot twists, but you will delight in the larger than life and humorous characters. They are so wretched! Everyone is obsessed with one thing-land. (Except the characters that run a brothel and claim they're better than their poor relatives). But land's the thing. How to hold on to it, how to keep from losing it through marriage or disinheritance. The entire family is presided over by a hideous, cruel, and rich matriarch, called La Grande, who is in her late eighties and was born during the Terror, in 1793. She often smiles to herself about how much she enjoys setting her family at each other's throats and inciting their murderous rage. She's deliberately designed her will to cause countless lawsuits between her benefactors! But the major plot centers around the Fouan family, La Grande's brother's family. Jean falls in love with La Grande's great-niece, Francoise, but there are problems. I can't give anything serious away in case you read this book, which you should if you haven't! You'll love it. It's as exciting as anything from our own time. Don't read the intro, by the way, until AFTER you read the book because the introduction gives away all the major plot points. I truly regret having read it. Read my introduction instead! Without getting into too much detail, suffice to say a bunch of land disputes come into play, because the nastiest and scariest member of the Fouan family has married Lise, Francoise's sister. He doesn't want Francoise to get married to Jean or anyone for that matter because A., he would lose some of the land he inherited from Francoise's late father, and B., he is obsessed with Francoise and believes his nu

This book is a masterpiece. Had Zola not written the awe-inspiring Germinal, this would clearly be his greatest work. Zola does his best writing when he focuses not on Parisian society but rather on the lower classes: the laborers, the peasants, the working stiffs. In this case, his subject matter is the farmers of the Beauce, an agricultural region between Chartres and Orleans. Here, families have cultivated the same plots of land for generations. In fact, land itself is everything to these people, and they will do whatever they can to protect the earth they have, and to acquire as much more as they can before they die. When Old Fouan decides to divide up his holdings among his three children, no one is happy with the portion they receive. Their avarice of earth leads to mutual animosity and eventually to treachery. Jean Macquart, an affable, hard-working farmhand, is, like us, an outsider in this hermetic world, until he falls in love with a farmer's daughter and becomes a participant in their private war. The scope of the book is wide, and looks beyond the Fouan family to examine political and social issues of the time, including the effect of the impending Franco-Prussian War, the triumphs and failures of modern scientific farming methods, and how the market's regulation of prices damns the farmers to eternal poverty. Zola's description of the agricultural life, its rewards and its hardships, is vivid and moving. He neither romanticizes nor denigrates the farmer's relationship to the land, but rather paints a realistic picture of dirty, exhausting toil that nonetheless has its physical and spiritual rewards. The book achieves a tremendous range of mood. It's like an emotional roller coaster. There are passages in the book which are downright terrifying. Elsewhere there are moments which are laugh-out-loud funny. Zola obviously had a lot of fun writing the more light-hearted scenes in the book. He includes everything from a farting contest to a vomiting donkey. Overall, however, this novel is a dark portrayal of human greed and selfishness, and the brutal lengths to which people will go to satisfy their hunger for property. This book should be read by all.

As the title implies, this is a story of the earth -- specifically, the land, the soil from which life springs. Zola may mean to conflate this to mean 'mud' -- that is, something unproductive and foul; after all, his characters display some sensationally base attributes and they can be completely gross. But ultimately, this is a novel about the pleasures and passions -- both good and bad -- that come from the love of the land, of making things grow, and of reaping what has been sown. The book is less concerned with the Rougon-Macquart family than with the peasant-farming community of the great plains of Beauce, France's breadbasket. Jean Macquart represents the family; he comes to the region after military service, first as a carpenter, then as a hired hand. But he functions mostly as a secondary character, only coming to prominence in the last 50 or so pages. Instead, Zola focuses on the Fouan family. The book starts with old man Fouan dividing the land he has slaved over for half a century among his three scheming children. His daughter Fanny is a penny-pincher more concerned with her reputation in the community than her father's (or her husband's) comforts. The youngest son Buteau is a (...) lecher who continually assaults his sister-in-law Francoise -- and to keep peace in the house, his wife Lise encourages her to give in. Buteau develops a love of his land that is positively erotic; Zola's descriptions of Buteau's intense emotions for the soil are impressive. Ultimately, it is money that drives Buteau, and his machinations to relieve his father of the old man's nest-egg are humorously chilling. Fouan's elder son Jesus Christ (so-called because of his resemblance to a Certain Prophet) is a poacher and a drunk, living in a hovel with his daughter, whose attendance on her flock of geese allows her to spy on the entire community. His is a life completely devoted to pleasure -- he is not interested in property unless it can be turned to cold hard cash. Completely depraved, he is addicted to farting. When a book has a line reading "Jesus Christ was a very flatulent man and in his house many winds did blow," readers should know that this isn't going to be a tale about sallow governesses and dainty tea-parties.A standout character is old man Fouan's even older sister La Grande, a formidably evil witch of a woman who carries a heavy stick to threaten anyone who crosses her path or disagrees with her. Zola risks caricature in creating this bitter old hag who holds sway over everyone (her driving motivation is to make everyone miserable), but she is neatly integrated with the rest of the large cast, though we never learn the source of her bitterness other than pure malice. There are dozens of scenes to enjoy and characters to savor. I particularly liked: *The donkey getting drunk and vomiting all over the courtyard. *The death of Lise and Francoise's father, who has a stroke, and the family stands around bickering, debating whether to spring for a doc

The ultimate naturalist novel. It may sound corny, but if ever a book was "earthy", this one certainly is. Many people, including Zola's fellow naturalists, have been disgusted by the scenes of rape, murder and general bad behaviour in it, but in fact none of them are included solely for their shock effect. The characters are all too true to life, and although they may be brutish, they are not all stupid, as is shown in the cafe discussions about the agricultural market and the threat from cheap American grain imports (remember, this is in the 1860s). One of the few Zola books where the member of the Rougon-Macquart family in it is not one of the main characters, and in fact his role in the action is almost accidental. For him, and perhaps for most readers, the farmers are aliens from another world but this book is an excellent work and one of Zola's best, though it may make you think twice about buying that nice little house in the country, especially in France.