The Kill: La Curee

This is, indeed, a loveless novel, one in which no character seems very redeemable and in which only one, Renee, as the once-abused, now-abusing, and finally discarded plaything of powerful or insipid men, ever even comes close. The patriarch, Aristide Sacard (nee Rougon) arrives in Paris in 1851 on the scent of plunder. Writes Zola: "He inhaled, the breath, vague as yet, that rose from the great city, that breath of the budding empire, laden already with odors of alcoves and financial hells, with the warm effluvia of sensuality. The faint fumes that reached him told him that he was on the right scent, that the game was scudding before him, that the great imperial hunt, the hunt after adventures, women, and millions, was at last about to commence." But to make money, you need money. Aristide gets his in the form of a dowry when he takes the beautiful Renee, ten years his junior, in exchange for a dowry that will enable him to commence his wildly fraudulent, often laughably complex speculative schemes. As a potential mate, Renee's currency has been debased by the fact that she was previously raped and that she is a member of a family who views her violation not with indignation but with fear for its scandal-causing potential. Renee eventually begins a sexual relationship with Maxime, Aristide's debauched son, ten years her junior, a useless, empty-headed young roue so free of the restraining fetters of decency that we're told that he "had vices before he had desires." Renee is fired by the transgressive nature of her lust for Maxime, but this at least betrays a residual awareness of the fact of boundaries, an awareness that makes her, curiously, the most moral of the novel's three main characters. Around this trio of powerfully rendered near-reprobates, you have a swirl of consumption, debauchery and plunder best captured near the end of the novel at a banquet in which Zola portrays the participants as behaving more like beasts than like people. This is a world on holiday from history, one in which you can change your name to abolish your past, and can proceed, in the name of rapine and progress, to carve up an ancient city, the better to enable the usurping Napoleon III to pretend, as all upstart rulers must, that history begins...wait for it...now. So, what redeems this horrid and dehumanizing picture? What makes a novel so teeming with incorrigibles worth even entertaining -- especially when you consider the novel's early scenes of lengthy and painfully detailed description do, to be honest, threaten initially to drag the early part of the novel down? Well, first, there's Zola's incredible ability to make three-dimensional characters leap from the page with a terrible believability. There is the fact that, once you get past those dull passages early in the book, the novel leaps ahead toward its suspenseful denouement at a pace that makes your head spin and that never again threatens to lose you. And finally, most importantly

So I picked up this novel for two reasons: 1) I read Therese Raquin and thought it brilliant, 2) The cover was appealing. This is the first and only novel I've read in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and, to be honest, I'm not rushing to read any more, but...I'm glad I read this one. The focus of the story, set in 2nd Empire Paris, revolves around Renee, the daughter of "old money" who marries into "new money": Aristide Saccard and his son Maxime. Aristide is a ruthless financier and Maxime is his dashing but effeminate son. Of course, the young Renee begins an affair with Maxime, an affair that is characterized by her lustful longing for some real connection to life. The affair is quickly regretted by Maxime but becomes an obsession of Renee's... ...And that's when the novel becomes absolutely brilliant. We watch the tortuous descent of Renee into the madness that we all expected to happen, but this madness' climax (chapter 6) is one of the great feats of modern literature. The setting of this climax is a costume ball of ridiculous extravagance. I can't adequately describe the satirical brilliance of this scene, but its absurdity ratchets up in intensity when Renee enters wearing...not much. I also don't want to spoil it. To make a long story short, she goes insane, not that we didn't expect it. Why read it? Because this climactic scene is itself an epic of nasty grandeur. Renee manages to be both sympathetic and abhorrent, leaving the reader to ask, "What just happened?" Don't get me wrong; this novel is boring and overly descriptive at first, but the descriptions slowly become more symbolically meaningful, as, for instance, when Renee's dressing and bathing room takes on the qualities of a vulva. And again I stress, the vividness and symbolism of the climax is INTENSE and marvelous. I'd recommend this novel for readers with A) patience and B) a keen eye for masterful construction. Otherwise, read the next Dan Brown novel (not that I've actually read anything by him). Oh, and if you're both pornographic and literary minded, thumbs up.

First of all, this translation is very readable. If that is your concern in whether to purchase (I'd rather read a bad novel than a good novel in a poor translation), then fear not. As to the novel itself, I have begun reading the Rougon-Macquart cycle in order, so this is my second book. I found the style of The Fortune of the Rougons carried over into this book, so the text is readable and wellplotted. I still found characterization a bit of a problem. The three main characters - Aristide, Renee, and Maxime - are rendered very well. So are a few supporting characters. For example, we get to know Sidonie Rougon who was only a footnote in the last book. However, most of the other characters are names and positions and not much else. This could be construed as serving Zola's purpose of illustrating the shallow lives of these people, but it can also get to be confusing. As another reviewer mentioned, there's a lot of decriptive passages relating to furnishings and interiors. Again, these may serve to instill the sense of superficiality, but the descriptions can slow the narrative. However, one description (of Renee's bedroom and dressing room) appears to be a method of commenting on the psychology of her sexual relationship with her stepson rather than just sheer description. I found this an interesting device. All the characters are bored and, despite having gained immense wealth, which if you read the last book you know was Aristide's all-consuming goal, one gets the feeling it is all for nothing. These people are consumers that make a cloud of locusts look restrained. Despite possessing hundreds of thousands of francs and "rivers of gold," they always seem one wrong step from bankruptcy. The final lines of the book underscore the sheer waste these people's lives represent. Searching for fulfillment while being morally incapable of attaining it, I couldn't help feeling Zola's characters resonated with present day CEOs and executives behind debacles like the Enron scandal. Zola's depiction of the Saccard family is like turning over a rock and analyzing the squirming, slimy depravity of people obsessed with acquisition, consumers whose appetites are never satisfied. In a sense, I get the feeling Zola's social criticism of the Second Empire will be a bit like looking at the Decline of Rome. And both speak to modern American culture.

Censored in 1871 when it was published and out of print since the 1950s, this is the first translation of The Kill in more than a century-and the effort was well worth it. It is a novel of a scheming family of three Parisians during France's Second Empire: Aristide Rougon, an ambitious, wicked real estate speculator; his young second wife, Renee, who's vacuous quest for pleasure is in its own way as destructive as her husband's quest for riches; and Maxime, Aristide's son and Renee's son-in-law, an idle rich young man of privilege. No one of the protagonists here are very sympathetic, and their rise and fall-while no surprise to the reader, certainly yields some very engaging and delightful storytelling by Zola. For those familiar with Paris, the rapidly changing face of the city during tin the 1850s and 60s will be particularly engaging. During this construction boom, vast thoroughfares are being built as masses of homes and buildings are being torn down to remake the Paris into a modern capital. On this level, The Kill works as the story demolition of the ancient city by the unscrupulous movers and shakers of the day. Zola, often described as a naturalist, is a master of description, and thanks to this excellent new translation, the novel does not show it's age at all.

A great book full of heartwrenching mellodrama. Greed and incest rear their ugly heads before the backdrop of Haussman's transformation of Paris in the mid 19th century. There is hardly a dull moment in this masterpiece. I have yet to read more of Zola, but you can bet I've got two other books by him waiting on my shelf. The story follows an opportunistic provincial descendant of the Roujon family as he makes his fortune in Paris. He heartlessly leaves his first wife to die as he makes arrangements for his second marriage- to a wealthy young woman half his age. Renee's spirit, already dimmed by a savage rape by a family member is only tarnished all the more in her extravagant new lifestyle under the negligent eye of the specuating schemester, Rougon. She falls madly in love with her efeminate stepson and seals her ruin which concides with the burst of the speculative bubble in Paris real estate. This review was based on the original French text