Product Description

'Respectable people... What bastards!' Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'état in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the city changed beyond recognition. The old Marché des Innocents has been knocked down as part of Haussmann's grand programme of urban reconstruction to make way for Les Halles, the spectacular new food markets. Disgusted by a bourgeois society whose devotion to food is inseparable from its devotion to the Government, Florent attempts an insurrection. Les Halles, apocalyptic and destructive, play an active role in Zola's picture of a world in which food and the injustice of society are inextricably linked. The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) is the third volume in Zola's famous cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart. It introduces the painter Claude Lantier and in its satirical representation of the bourgeoisie and capitalism complements Zola's other great novels of social conflict and urban poverty.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31306 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

The Underbelly
I am an unashamed devotee of Zola, and find very little to fault in any of his novels. This is especially true of the more recent translations which are much easier to read than those by Vizetelly, admittedly written over a hundred years ago. Zola's novels are much more "earthy" and "real" than those by Dickens and Thackery for example, and being much, much shorter and sharper make them, in my opinion, superior pieces of literature. As this is the newest release of a modern translation, as it were, it can receive 5 stars on behalf of all the other Zola works out there.

The closest you'll ever get to actually being there....
What came as the greatest shock to me, when first reading anything by Zola was how very modern, accessible and readable the books actually are - if the stately narrative pace and long digressions into political theorizing or heavy handed caricature of Dickens or Tolstoy have put you off 'classic' 19th Century literature , take heart - these are a cracking read.

This novel is one of the less well known ones, partly I suspect because the actual plot is the least of it, compared to, say, Nana or Therese Raquin, and thus not amenable to being filmed as a 100 minute drama by Hollywood or even the BBC.

No, the apppeal of this one is the extraordinarily detailed exposition of day to day life for working people in an around Les Halles in Paris - what they ate, what they wore, how they talked, what they thought - it quickly becomes an immersive experience of extraordinary power. If you like that sort of thing