Customer Reviews

La Bęte Humaine (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is, hands down, the most exciting of Zola's novels. It reads as quickly as any current novel on the best sellers' list, yet it contains all the elements we love about Zola, particularly his unique way of making social commentary the focal point of his novels. If you've never read Zola, I would recommend this book as your introduction into his world.

In this book, Zola dives headlong into his fascination with "the human beast" by examining the psychology of murder. The novel is also a detailed portrait of the lives of railroad workers. The main character is Jacques Lantier, son of Gervaise Macquart (of L'Assomoir), a railroad engineer who works the line between Paris and Le Havre. Jacques feels a nagging compulsion to kill every woman he's attracted to. Fortunately, up to this point he has been able to control himself, but who knows how long he will be able to restrain the killer inside? Jacques is not the only character with murder on his mind; in fact, everyone in the book seems to be plotting to kill someone. Murder for love, murder for greed, murder for revenge are all represented. Zola has crammed so much violence and suspense into the plot, that on the surface he's written a fabulous piece of pulp fiction. Though the book pushes the boundaries of believability, it's also a fascinating study of human nature. The reader gains a window into the minds of the characters that reminds one of Poe's best tales. Underlying the criminal plot threads is a deeper level of social commentary, scientific inquiry, and philosophical debate. Zola shows how the rise of industrial technology contributes to the moral degeneration and dehumanization of the populace. He portrays Jacques' relationship with his engine as a symbiotic, almost romantic relationship. Meanwhile Jacques' Aunt Phasie and her family operate a crossing/switching station in the middle of nowhere, where their only interaction with the outside world comes in split-second views of nameless passengers being carted off to unknown destinations. While the railroad provides speed and convenience, it also generates social isolation and anonymity. Fans of Zola or readers of classical literature in general will certainly enjoy this book. Even fans of contemporary suspense fiction should find it entertaining and thought-provoking.

This is one of Zola's most violent and disturbing novels, but it possesses a kind of "tragic grandeur," to quote the translator, which makes it story and its characters live on in the mind long after the reader has turned the last page. Part crime thriller and partly a novel of railway life, it tells the story of a group of people who are slaves to their passions and whose ultimate doom is preordained by their backgrounds and temperaments. There are marvellous passages of descriptive writing and if you think that a novel about the railways is bound to be dull you will find yourself happily mistaken. The depiction of Jacques, genetically doomed to be a murderer, is more frightening than any Hannibal Lecter. Some modern readers may have difficulty empathising with Zola's ideological beliefs, but in the end the novel carries all before it. A shattering, truly memorable work of art, very well translated.

Initially, I gave La Bete Humaine five stars, but after some thought downgraded it to four. It's quite good, and in parts downright spectacular, but in all honesty it doesn't rank on the same level as the monolithic L'Assommoir, Germinal and Nana. The problem lies with the premise. In the three aforementioned novels, the characters were all basically ordinary people. This made it easy to be pulled into their emotional struggles, and made for unspeakably captivating reading because it was so easy to see how _real_ and _human_ they were. I stood behind L'Assommoir's Gervaise all the way, _literally loudly yelling_ as I accompanied her to L'Assommoir's inevitable conclusion.

I did not have the same reaction in La Bete Humaine. The protagonist is an "ordinary person," except he's afflicted with a mental disorder that makes him want to kill women. And thus, all his character development works to develop that one unfortunate aspect of his personality. I could not get inside his head. I could not see reality in his emotional struggle. To be frank, his moral dilemmas seemed very much invented by Zola, as opposed to taken from life. Admittedly, they were very elaborate inventions and _still_ made for captivating reading - that's why I'm still giving it four stars. Gervaise is a real character. Jacques Lantier is a writer's invention.

I would, however, deem it necessary for you to read La Bete Humaine, if only for one scene - the train wreck. That is one of Zola's most powerful scenes ever. It is really quite amazing. As I read, I saw and heard it happen, and I rallied behind the people that courageously stood up to the catastrophe just like I rallied behind Gervaise in L'Assommoir. It needs to be read to be believed. But the rest, I'm not too thrilled with in the end, and I didn't walk away carrying an image of any character from the book in my brain for days like I did after reading L'Assommoir, Germinal and Nana. So four stars it is. La Bete Humaine is a worthy member of the Rougon-Macquart series, and deserving of your time, but falls just short of greatness.

One of Zola's best and most famous works. There is something strangely fascinating about a murder where the killer escapes detection and punishment only to receive terminal treatment from another, totally unexpected source. When this happens twice in the same book, along with some tales of child abuse, a high-level cover-up, a sabotage attempt on a train in which virtually everyone is killed in the carnage except the persons targeted, a suicide, plus some assorted couplings outside of the marshalling yards, things get really interesting. What makes people commit such crimes? Here Zola really shows his skill in explaining his characters' motives and the dark, primeval forces that drive them. A pulsating, chilling story from beginning to end, full of unexpected twists, starting with the creation of a previously unknown member of the Macquart family as the novel's main character. Highly recommended for long train or air journeys.

This is one of the most violent novels ever written. As other novels in the Rougon-Macquart series focused on alcoholism or prostitution or politics or the artworld, this novel focuses on murder. It seems that every character here is some kind of murderer, that the entire human race consists either of murderers or potential murderers needing only the right spark to set off their explosions. The setting for Zola's story is the world of the Paris railroad, the neighborhood around the Gare St.Lazare, a fitting environment in which to place people who often seem more like mechanized murder-machines than well-rounded human beings. The power of this novel comes not from its realism but from its strangeness. It is, in its way, as bizarre as anything concocted by Hoffmann or Poe. This is where Zola's Naturalism comes full-circle and meets the Poe-esque terror of "Therese Raquin", Zola's early 'Naturalistic' ghost story. The conjunction gives this novel more of a Modernist feel than we usually find in Zola's work.
I should also mention the prose. The publisher's choice of a Monet 'Gare St.Lazare' painting for the cover of this edition is fitting because Zola's prose here seems to be influenced by his own experience of Impressionist paintings. It seems that Monet and his cohorts taught Zola how to see and describe the modern world in a new way.

There is something very profound in "La Bete Humaine/The Beast in Man", in spite of the fact that all of its characters have a very superficial mentality. Its scenes recreate very well the atmosphere of the late days of the Second Empire. Jacques Lantier is the main character, but the novel is not at all centered around him or his urge to kill women; only as late as chapter eight he attempts to commit a violent act and it is as late as chapter eleven that he does commit a violent act. The abundance of adultery, police incompetence, two single murders (chapters one and twelve), a multiple murder (chapter ten) both committed purely out of jealousy and an uxoricide committed out of greed all show the living environment and the morale of those days. Definitely, one of the major novels of the Rougon-Macquart series.

A gripping story of murder and lust, of the dark side of human nature -- of the beast within. The most brilliant aspects of the novel are Zola's descriptions of trains and railways on the Paris-Le Havre line, around which all action from murder to love to jealousy to a magnificently described train wreck commences. The protagonist is a young engine driver Jacques Lantier in the 1870s, son of Gervaise (depicted in _L'Assommoir_) and half-brother of Nana. Jacques is never mentioned in the earlier novels as Zola only invented him later for a clear purpose in _La Bete Humaine_.

Jacques unfortunately is the most flagrant blemish of this novel. He is an obvious literary invention, an over-simplification, and perhaps some of the other characters too are simplified to a slightly lesser extent, but Jacques' tormented character is clearly psychologically unsustainable and more of a theoretical strawman than a fully developed individual. In contrast with _Germinal_, _Nana_, and _L'Assommoir_, this sacrifice of reality for tendency is also why _La Bete Humaine_ ends up lacking in the realistic depth of the mentioned novels. Some plot twists only add to the sense of lessened realism, especially when everything takes place in about a year's time, and it all takes away some of the sting of Zola's criticism of the powers that be. Nonetheless, _La Bete Humaine_, in its depiction of primeval murderous traits hiding underneath the educated sheen of modern 19th century society, buried deep in the thunderous rumble of railways, resonates in the recesses of human mind with its sinister tragedy.

Oxford World's Classics series version is the latest English translation of the novel. Zola's colloquialisms are rendered here well in a suitably colloquial English tone, although there are a couple of "blimeys", which are English enough to appear bizarre in a French novel, translation or not. 3 stars for the meat of the book: trains and railways.

Let's get over the slight failings, if failings they be, in this lush, noirish novel. The plot, such as it is, is rickety and the coincidences absolutely Dickensian. The characters, moreover, do not comport with Zola's so-called "Realism," for which he is taken much to task. But thank the devil they don't! Jacques, especially, is driven by atavistic forces beyond his control, reminiscent of Conrad's characters in his better novels. - To my mind, there is nothing more unreal than what is termed "Realism." I could quote an entire page from Proust on why this is so, but I shall be an urbane reviewer and forbear.

This book, as many others have pointed out, owes its dark heart not so much to Darwin as to Poe. In point of fact, I have never read a novel that is so stamped with Poe's influence, from the money and pelf taken from the murdered President hidden under the Roubauds' floorboard until it eats into their hearts - "The Tell-Tale Heart" - to the dark atmospherics that permeate the work. But the work of Poe's to which Zola is most indebted is Poe's essay, "The Imp of The Perverse." In one part of the essay, Poe describes it as that urge (sometimes faint, sometimes profound) that comes on one at the top of a precipice or at the edge of a chasm to let oneself go and plunge into it. And who of us has not stood looking down with our hands glued to a guardrail and not felt this inner tug? This is how Jacques feels when sexually aroused. Is this all so alien and "unreal," or do we simply not like to admit these things to ourselves? The question is, ahem, rhetorical.

This novel, despite its dark content, is so swimmingly delightful to read that one almost forgets the plot and the murders. And, much of this delight, mirabile dictu, is due to the steam locomotive:

"The express engine stood motionless, letting off from its safety valve a great jet of steam up into all this blackness, and there it flaked off into little wisps, bedewing with white tears the limitless funereal hangings of the heavens."

I had to stop several times during the novel and re-read passages like the above, so as to savour every word.

Yes, the courts are corrupt, the characters are more than a touch Gothic and murders most foul abound. The odd thing is that not one of these things seems to matter at all in the great scheme of things. Unlike Zola's other novels that I have read, this novel is forward-looking, away from the Nineteenth Century strait jacket of "Realism" towards the deeper novels of Conrad and others, who delve into the inner dream that is life.

I can't recall such a horrific novel that I've both enjoyed and appreciated so much!

Zola's "La Bete Humaine" appears to be two books crammed into one; the first - and dominant - story is that of people undergoing moral and cultural deterioration as a result of technology and industrialization. Railroads are absolutely central to the novel, being the fastest mode of transportation at the time and reshaping rural society into a series of isolated stopping-points. Similar things have been said/written about the highway culture of America, but nobody can go over the top like Zola.

There is the secondary story of a bumbling legal system, where a murder investigation is carried out by ego and wrongheaded "instinct," rather than, you know, facts.

"La Bete Humaine" is a great read and I think it's better than "Nana" and "The Earth" (which are both very good), but somewhere short of "Germinal." Woven into the story, in no subtle terms, is a description of severely perverse and just plain evil motives. Another example of classic literature that is completely approachable by dedicated fans of genre fiction, should they decide to try it.