Earth [Hardcover]

Emile Zola (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1955

When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family. Aging and Lear-like, Old Man Fouan has decided to divide his land between his three children: his penny-pinching daughter Fanny, his eldest son - a far from holy figure known as Jesus Christ' - and the lecherous Buteau, Macquart's friend. But, in a community where land is everything, sibling rivalry quickly turns to brutal hatred, as Buteau declares himself unsatisfied with his lot. Part of the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle, "The Earth" was regarded by Zola as his greatest novel. A fascinating portrayal of a struggling but decadent community, it offers a compelling exploration of the destructive nature of human ignorance and greed.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature. Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L'Assomoir (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, Nana (1880), dealing with prostitution, and Germinal (1885). Translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 430 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (1955)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0007EP6AI
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,604,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The second best novel of all time?, May 3, 2005

By 

Karl Janssen (Olathe, KS United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Earth: La Terre (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This book is a masterpiece. Had Zola not written the awe-inspiring Germinal, this would clearly be his greatest work. Zola does his best writing when he focuses not on Parisian society but rather on the lower classes: the laborers, the peasants, the working stiffs. In this case, his subject matter is the farmers of the Beauce, an agricultural region between Chartres and Orleans. Here, families have cultivated the same plots of land for generations. In fact, land itself is everything to these people, and they will do whatever they can to protect the earth they have, and to acquire as much more as they can before they die. When Old Fouan decides to divide up his holdings among his three children, no one is happy with the portion they receive. Their avarice of earth leads to mutual animosity and eventually to treachery. Jean Macquart, an affable, hard-working farmhand, is, like us, an outsider in this hermetic world, until he falls in love with a farmer's daughter and becomes a participant in their private war.
The scope of the book is wide, and looks beyond the Fouan family to examine political and social issues of the time, including the effect of the impending Franco-Prussian War, the triumphs and failures of modern scientific farming methods, and how the market's regulation of prices damns the farmers to eternal poverty. Zola's description of the agricultural life, its rewards and its hardships, is vivid and moving. He neither romanticizes nor denigrates the farmer's relationship to the land, but rather paints a realistic picture of dirty, exhausting toil that nonetheless has its physical and spiritual rewards.
The book achieves a tremendous range of mood. It's like an emotional roller coaster. There are passages in the book which are downright terrifying. Elsewhere there are moments which are laugh-out-loud funny. Zola obviously had a lot of fun writing the more light-hearted scenes in the book. He includes everything from a farting contest to a vomiting donkey. Overall, however, this novel is a dark portrayal of human greed and selfishness, and the brutal lengths to which people will go to satisfy their hunger for property. This book should be read by all.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back to the roots, October 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Earth: La Terre (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

The ultimate naturalist novel. It may sound corny, but if ever a book was "earthy", this one certainly is. Many people, including Zola's fellow naturalists, have been disgusted by the scenes of rape, murder and general bad behaviour in it, but in fact none of them are included solely for their shock effect. The characters are all too true to life, and although they may be brutish, they are not all stupid, as is shown in the cafe discussions about the agricultural market and the threat from cheap American grain imports (remember, this is in the 1860s). One of the few Zola books where the member of the Rougon-Macquart family in it is not one of the main characters, and in fact his role in the action is almost accidental. For him, and perhaps for most readers, the farmers are aliens from another world but this book is an excellent work and one of Zola's best, though it may make you think twice about buying that nice little house in the country, especially in France.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sex! Incest! Murder! and...Farming! and...Flatulence?!, August 7, 2005

By 

Justice - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Earth: La Terre (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

You'll find all five in abundance in this book, I kid you not!

I love Zola, and I'm trying to get through all the Rougon-Macquart series. For those of you that don't know, Zola wrote a 20-novel saga about a family under the Second Empire. So far I have read about six. They are all thrilling, exciting, lurid, and wonderful. This one is no exception. It is amazing and I loved it, although it was my least favorite so far among the Zola books I have read so far. (However, in its defense, it was undoubtedly the dirtiest!) The main character is one Jean Macquart, really a very nice and ordinary guy (later to fight in the Franco-Prussian war in Zola's The Debacle, the penultimate of the Rougon-Macquart, which I'm reading now) who becomes a farm hand in the most perverse, twisted peasant village you could ever imagine.

Why is this my least favorite Zola novel so far? Because it's very hard to care about the characters, whereas in some of his other books, such as "L'Assommoir", featuring Jean Macquart's sister Gervaise, or "Germinal", featuring Gervaise's son and Jean's nephew Etienne, the characters were sympathetic and the stories tragic. But almost no one was sympathetic in this book except for Jean. The evil characters were so awful you could barely read about them. I can't give away all the plot twists, but you will delight in the larger than life and humorous characters. They are so wretched!

Everyone is obsessed with one thing-land. (Except the characters that run a brothel and claim they're better than their poor relatives). But land's the thing. How to hold on to it, how to keep from losing it through marriage or disinheritance. The entire family is presided over by a hideous, cruel, and rich matriarch, called La Grande, who is in her late eighties and was born during the Terror, in 1793. She often smiles to herself about how much she enjoys setting her family at each other's throats and inciting their murderous rage. She's deliberately designed her will to cause countless lawsuits between her benefactors! But the major plot centers around the Fouan family, La Grande's brother's family.

Jean falls in love with La Grande's great-niece, Francoise, but there are problems. I can't give anything serious away in case you read this book, which you should if you haven't! You'll love it. It's as exciting as anything from our own time. Don't read the intro, by the way, until AFTER you read the book because the introduction gives away all the major plot points. I truly regret having read it. Read my introduction instead!

Without getting into too much detail, suffice to say a bunch of land disputes come into play, because the nastiest and scariest member of the Fouan family has married Lise, Francoise's sister. He doesn't want Francoise to get married to Jean or anyone for that matter because A., he would lose some of the land he inherited from Francoise's late father, and B., he is obsessed with Francoise and believes his numerous attempts to rape her will eventually succeed.

Meanwhile, everyone is sleeping with everyone, from cousin to cousin to brother and sister; people are slaughtered for their land, everyone is terribly cruel to everyone, and you find out a lot of things you didn't know about the nineteenth-century. For instance, did you know that people found flatulence as funny then as we do now?! Quite the history lesson.

One of the best characters in the book, the eldest Fouan son (called Jesus Christ because of his long hair and beard) can fart at will and always has some stashed up no matter what the occasion. You can't hope to win if you bet him that he can't fart, let's say, six times in a row. He can, no matter what time of day, and keeps getting free drinks on account of it.

There are a lot of graphic sexual scenes. This is foreshadowed by the opening scene, where Francoise mates a bull and cow! Later, animal stories are symbolically repeated with the people. They are "of the earth" and it's "all natural". Here, some of Zola's metaphors were a bit heavier handed than in his other works, and while elsewhere he made me feel terrible and shed tears about the plight of the working class in 19th century France, here he made peasants sound very unsympathetic.

Although one can understand their fears over foreign competition and their desire to have the government protect their produce, it's still hard to understand how that translated into the nastiest people I can ever remember reading about. In Zola's other books he somehow made the poverty more vivid, he made me feel it was directly responsible for people losing their dignity and their ability to live decently.

Here, it's not clear what is going on or how on earth family members would be driven to rape each other, kill each other, and steal from each other. At first their bickering is realistic, then it turns insane. Apparently Zola based his account on reports by priests from the time in these villages, and peasants who had read the book, according to Zola's son in law, tended to recognize their neighbors in the book! (If not themselves, he added, the introduction tells us.) But it still seems exaggerated to me. I still think most peasants wouldn't do what the main characters in this book did. It's an extreme example.

Don't get the wrong idea. You will still love this book although I think if you're going to read one Zola book only read Germinal or l'Assommoir. This book will keep you both laughing and reeling from how crazy and disgusting these peasants are, but it's highly unsympathetic, although I'm not sure Zola intended it to be.

I think, based on what I've read, that he felt that these were the people who were the lifeblood of France, and tried to "naturalize" their lives and make them somehow outside bougeois morality. I'm not sure it quite worked, despite his genius, but it's a great story. I think I'll read more about what he was trying to do later, because it's not always clear. As fans of his novels know, he tries to put forth "scientific" explanations for human behavior but ultimately he is a great artist and his work transcends his pretenses.

Despite the problems with the book, he's still one of the best writers ever: Vive Zola!