Product Description

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations, Lantier retains his belief in the ultimate germination of a new society, leading to a better world. Germinal is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, but it is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigour and power in this new translation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83229 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Synopsis
Written to draw attention to the misery prevailing among the poor in France during the Second Empire, this novel depicts the grim struggle between capital and labour in a coalfield in northern France. Yet, through the blackness of this picture, humanity is constantly apparent.

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.