Product Description

Zola's 1885 masterpiece of everyday relationships and working life exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. The new film version stars Gerard Depardieu. An Oxford University Press World Classic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168559 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-28
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

claustrophobic excellence.
I read this book for an ou course. If it had not been on the list there is no way I could have finished it.
It is so well written that you can see smell and hear everything in it. It scared me and it upset me. I found myself sympathising with violence-not something I am used to.
Would you enjoy this book? no definately not that is the wrong word. Should you read it anyway? definately! it is worth getting out of your comfort zone for. I wanted to give this very few stars for making me angry and for making me cry but it's just written so well. Just because I didn't laugh or enjoy the storyline does not alter the fact that I will forever remember this book it has challenged so many of my ideas.

I don't believe I'll read a better book
I love this book. I read it over twenty years ago but the closing chapters, set in the mine, will never leave me. It is brilliant. One of my all time top novels.

One of the best books ever written
I first read this when I was about 12 years old (in an English translation, I hasten to add) as I had run out of reading matter and came across this book in my grandfather's study.

I am now 62 years of age, but have never forgotten the initial impact this made on me. Somehow Zola's writing is so descriptive and evocative that one feels that one is really there in the suffering and squalor along with the characters. The suffering and social deprivation of those times is quite unbelievable as we look back over 150 years.

I do not know who translated that edition but I have read it in the original French since, where it is even more
moving.

If you haven't read it, please do, you'll be glad you did and, as someone else wrote in review, it could even change your life or, at the very least give you much pause for thought.