Customer Reviews

The Earth (Signet Modern Classics)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

Zola's series of books on life during Napoleon III's reign will probably never be criticized for shying away from readers' sensitivities. La Terre is a very good book, and Zola's declared favorite, but the very brutishness of the acts perpetrated by the characters (other Amazon reviews have summarized them) tend to overwhelm the lighter moments. In fact, the simple humor (dunghill marriage proposals, drunken barnyard animals and the lifestyle of the character named Jesus Christ) is the main current of the story, and suggests that there's not a whole lot that can be done to change the ways of provincial farmers. Like Germinal, the protagonist Jean (a member of the family tree that connects all 20 novels in Zola's series) quickly becomes the character needed to move along the plot - while the other, more colorful beings form Zola's themes.

Like another of the Zola Penguin editions, I found the translation very readable and the translator's introduction useful, but the back cover summary misleading. Though many of the activities featured in the book are seasonal (wine-making, the harvest, etc.), the story of greed, squabbling and murder is a one-way street. "Unremitting hardship" is experienced by the farmers, but much of it is their own doing - they reap in continual poverty what they sowed in short-run greed and mental laziness. Zola would really not have us feel sorry for these characters, where even the most pitiful - Hilarion, for example, carry out grevious crimes.

There's a hostility to innovation, change, religion and outsiders that keeps the people of Beauce at a hardscrabble existence. Change would seem to come anyway, in the form of imports from America (fertile soil and the Homestead act brought about the most rapid liberalization of land ownership in history during this time). I can't help but be reminded of the election year Outsourcing panic that was used in Wisconsin campaign advertisements. Wasn't it just a few years ago that a lot of us were stuck in the Dilbert Zone? If we couldn't take the monotony of cubicle life and abhorred all the infighting and micromanagement, why are we so terrified of India? Would this not be the catalyst for change that we requested back in the 1990's? If there's a contemporary lesson from La Terre, it might be located in Part 5, Chapter 4, where a liqoured-up Lequeu finally vents his feelings to the locals, who cheer the upcoming Franco-Prussian War.

There are two English translations of `La Terre`, the first was by Henry Vizetelly in 1888, it is freely available on Internet Archive, Gutenberg and in later re-prints. Vizetelly was jailed for 3 months for indecency by uptight Victorians, but he really should have been jailed for the bowdlerizations. Luckily in 1980 Parmee made an excellent translation for Penguin Classics (as `The Earth`), which, as of this review, is the most recent available. Amazon lists it as out of print but this is not accurate, it can still be purchased new (but apparently not on Amazon!). The problem is Penguin recycles it's ISBN numbers so the original 1980 Penguin edition is out print and the new 1990's edition (new cover, same otherwise) is not showing up in Amazon's database.

`La Terre` never entirely succeeds as `Germinal` did, the work most comparable. It is am ambitious book that could have been epic and one of his very best, but Zola tries to do too much and the energy is diffused. There are over 100 named characters, many with multiple names making at least 150 names, plus the many interrelated family relationships between each. This requires significant genealogical memory and the reward is not entirely satisfying. Zola was trying to recreate a whole rural farming village but aesthetically it didn't come together. Unlike in `Germinal` which has class struggle for a brighter future, there is no larger theme of social justice. The first 200 pages are slow, and the final 50 are like an antiquated picaresque Dickens novel with all the loose ends tied up in an epic single afternoon of action. However unlike Dickens there are no happy endings here!

On the positive side, it's Emile Zola. Zola is a genius at choosing and describing detail so the reader has a fair idea what "A Day in the Life of a Peasant" was like, and the book is worth reading for its anthropological aspects alone. It is comically scatological, which Zola did on purpose since the novel is about the earth (night soil, etc..), "dark humor" at its best, who knew Zola could be so funny. But this comes across a bit pejorative, highlighting the worst aspects of the rural and poor.

It's not a bad novel, but I don't think it achieved what Zola intended, and aesthetically isn't as fully realized as `Germinal`. If your a fan of Zola you will probably enjoy it, but not before some of his better known works.

While reading the novel I wished I had a complete list of the characters. I've since found an old book called "A Zola Dictionary" (1912) which contains a list which I've re-formatted for the web. See the comments section below for the URL, it is very helpful.

The connection to the Rougon - Macquart series is Jean Macquart (the brother of Gervaise from "L'Assommoir"), but even though he is the main character in that respect "The Earth" is about so much more. Mainly the human condition told through the lives of the townsfolk and farmers of Beauce. Jealousy, murder, rape, farting, love, blasphemy, birth, longing, violence, cursing, sex it's all here...even a belligerent puking donkey! Yes, Zola's storytelling can sometimes be shocking bordering on vulgar, but so is life. A masterpiece.

As the title implies, this is a story of the earth -- specifically, the land, the soil from which life springs. Zola may mean to conflate this to mean 'mud' -- that is, something unproductive and foul; after all, his characters display some sensationally base attributes and they can be completely gross. But ultimately, this is a novel about the pleasures and passions -- both good and bad -- that come from the love of the land, of making things grow, and of reaping what has been sown.

The book is less concerned with the Rougon-Macquart family than with the peasant-farming community of the great plains of Beauce, France's breadbasket. Jean Macquart represents the family; he comes to the region after military service, first as a carpenter, then as a hired hand. But he functions mostly as a secondary character, only coming to prominence in the last 50 or so pages. Instead, Zola focuses on the Fouan family. The book starts with old man Fouan dividing the land he has slaved over for half a century among his three scheming children. His daughter Fanny is a penny-pincher more concerned with her reputation in the community than her father's (or her husband's) comforts. The youngest son Buteau is a (...) lecher who continually assaults his sister-in-law Francoise -- and to keep peace in the house, his wife Lise encourages her to give in. Buteau develops a love of his land that is positively erotic; Zola's descriptions of Buteau's intense emotions for the soil are impressive. Ultimately, it is money that drives Buteau, and his machinations to relieve his father of the old man's nest-egg are humorously chilling.

Fouan's elder son Jesus Christ (so-called because of his resemblance to a Certain Prophet) is a poacher and a drunk, living in a hovel with his daughter, whose attendance on her flock of geese allows her to spy on the entire community. His is a life completely devoted to pleasure -- he is not interested in property unless it can be turned to cold hard cash. Completely depraved, he is addicted to farting. When a book has a line reading "Jesus Christ was a very flatulent man and in his house many winds did blow," readers should know that this isn't going to be a tale about sallow governesses and dainty tea-parties.

A standout character is old man Fouan's even older sister La Grande, a formidably evil witch of a woman who carries a heavy stick to threaten anyone who crosses her path or disagrees with her. Zola risks caricature in creating this bitter old hag who holds sway over everyone (her driving motivation is to make everyone miserable), but she is neatly integrated with the rest of the large cast, though we never learn the source of her bitterness other than pure malice.

There are dozens of scenes to enjoy and characters to savor. I particularly liked: *The donkey getting drunk and vomiting all over the courtyard. *The death of Lise and Francoise's father, who has a stroke, and the family stands around bickering, debating whether to spring for a doctor, as he slowly dies -- followed by a hailstorm that destroys the crops as the neglected father goes into rigor mortis on the floor. *The juxtaposition of Lise going into labor at the same time as a favorite cow, which receives more attention from the neighbors -- Lise included. *The frustrations of the priest Godard, who refuses to hold any more services in the parish not so much because of the heathenness of the residents but because he must walk four miles. *The hypocrisy of M and Mme Charles, whose oh-so-respectable lives are built on the profits of running a brothel for decades -- a hypocrisy shared by the entire community. *The ongoing verbal battles between Flore Lengaigne the grocer's wife and Coelina Macqueron the tobacconist's wife, constantly fanned by the surface kindness of Mme Becu, the village gossip. *The snide fun made of Berthe Macqueron, the village beauty who is hairless below her neck and is called "Hasn't Got Any" behind her back. *Mme Frimat, who collects human excrement to use for fertilizer for her garden vegetables.

Eventually, "La Terre" is the story of community, and it is significant that the outsider Jean is forced out at the end. For all their bickering, hypocrisy, godlessness, treachery, and murder, the Beauce farmers are still a community. They live at their own rhythm -- the rhythm of The Earth -- and can't care less about morals. The only relevant laws are the unwritten ones pertaining to community, family, and Mother Earth, no matter how destructive. On the whole, a wonderful book, one of my favorites of the Rougon-Macquart series.

It's not at all certain that Emile Zola intended any allusion to Shakespeare's most tragic tragedy in this, his most tragic novel, yet many critics have noted the similarity. The narrative of La Terre is set in motion by the fatal decision of Père Fouan, a peasant on the wheat-growing plains near Paris, to divide his small plots of soil between his three children on the understanding that they will all provide an annuity to sustain him in his old age. Of course it doesn't work; the three children are all as stubborn, callous, and selfish as the old man. They begrudge him the smallest cost, they squabble at each other, and they pass him rudely from household to household until he ends up, like Lear, a mad decrepit ruin raging in a night storm on the open fields. Old Fouan is anything but a wise patriarch or a man of simple virtues, yet his plight is so dismal and his three children so hatefully indifferent to his humanity that one eventually feels an immense pity for him, and for the whole class of peasantry enslaved to a dying agricultural inheritance. A second plot weaves through La Terre, the story of Fouan's nieces Lise and Françoise, the first of whom marries her cousin Buteau, Fouan's brutal second son, while Françoise is wooed by the landless laborer Jean. I won't disclose any more of the story lines.

Earthy? Yes, of course; how should The Earth not be earthy?

Filthy then? Unquestionably! Peasant agriculture existed on filth, on manure and mud, and Zola's descriptions of peasant life reek of both.

Obscene? La Terre was denounced as pornographic at the time of its publication in 1887, and in comparison to any serious work in English literature of the 19th C, it's shockingly 'naturalistic' in its depictions of fornication, violation, defecation, flatulence, and violence ... all inscribed in words of fewer syllables.

Beastly? Why not? When humans live with and like beasts, Zola expresses, they will be beastly to each other. The unlucky laborer Jean is plainly the least beastly character in the novel, the only one who shows any empathy or conscience. That's any extraordinary concession from Zola, amounting almost to a refutation of the author's central 'deterministic' thesis of the influence of heredity on the individual, since good-hearted Jean is in fact Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart, one of the founding scoundrels of the Rougon-Macquart dynasty of scoundrels whose lives are chronicled across the twenty volumes of Zola's vast human tragedy. Jean Macquart will also be a central and sympathetic character in Zola's great novel of the Franco-Prussian War, "La Debacle". [And where is "our" Zola, the writer of sufficient moral stature to portray the 'Debacle in Iraq'? Someone to lavish the same contempt on the Imperial Presidencies of Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush that Zola heaped on the Second Empire of Napoleon III?]

Jean Macquart is the only explicit link between La Terre and the other Rougon-Macquart novels, and Zola spends far fewer words on exposing the corruption of the Second Empire in La Terre than in other books. In fact, La Terre is probably Zola's least digressive, least theoretical novel. Zola was not a scion of the peasantry; he had to research the lifestyles and conditions of agricultural France as systematically as a scholar in order to prepare himself to write La Terre, but his scholarship is thoroughly amalgamated into his narrative. It's hard to recall that he wasn't writing from first-hand experience of the hardship and isolation of peasant life. His descriptions are as convincing as glass-plate photographs, even more convincing than the paintings of peasants by Millet and other pre-impressionists such as the "Man with a Hoe" on the cover of this Penguin edition. [I've just had the good fortune, by the way, to cross paths with a touring exhibition of French 19th C paintings from the Musee D'Orsay. What a lot of insight those paintings offer into Zola's writings! And the Rougon-Macqaurt novels illuminate the paintings even more brightly. I'd strongly recommend pursuing this juxtaposition of Zola with Millet/Manet/Cezanne/van Gogh if you have an interest in either writing or painting. Zola was an influential art critic as well as a novelist, and an major advocate of the Impressionists.]

The two story lines of La Terre - the divided inheritance and the stalled love - are only embellishments of this vast depiction of rural France, of The Earth that was for generation after peasant generation, and that was at the edge of the precipice of modernity in Zola's times. It's The Soil itself that holds this novel together. In the end, the soil and the humanity it supports, however miserably, are the protagonists of Zola's novel. The sheer bulk of information about agricultural and domestic technologies in pre-modern rural France would make La Terre a classic of anthropology, yet all the carefully detailed realism is blended so dramatically into the narrative that one never gets bored with it. The brief excitements of the human life cycle - copulations, births, marriages, deaths - spin past in hectic disorder against the ever-recurring cycles of The Land, the Good Earth, the Bread Giver, forever re-fertilized by the compost of human struggles. Zola's novel of the soil is the least romanticized and yet most emotionally potent portrayal of peasant life in all literature.

In today's France, the landscape of its countryside is as beautiful as the architecture of its cities. However, some 150 years ago, under the reign of Napoleon III, the rural France went through a lot of turmoil. The long-lasting patriarchal traditions were broken away. The period in history, which Zola himself called in the preface to the novel "la Fortune des Rougons/the Fortune of Rougons" "the strange era of madness and shame" not only perverted the city-dwellers, but also brutalized the villagers. That is why the novel abounds with scenes of rape, incest, cupidity and squabbles. There are also very graphic scenes of matricide (part 3, chapter 2), patricide (part 5, chapter 5), filicide (part 5, chapter 2) and sororicide (part 5, chapter 3). Eventually it turned out that villagers can not live in peace not only in the world of the living, but also in the world of the beyond (part 5, chapter 6). If there are other ironic passages of this novel it would be a marital proposal being made on a dunghill (part 4, chapter 6), a spontaneous child delivery (part 3, chapter 5) or a family that sets up and runs a whorehouse tries to bring up an orderly girl. However, laughs and ironies here are muffled by beastly instincts of the characters of this novel, which is the second to "la Bete Humaine/the Beast in Man" most violent Rougon-Macquart novel.

Among other things: here Zola had a great opportunity to create a noble savage, but he did not use it. In fact, in all the Rougon-Macquart novels, even the best characters (not only the members of the Rougon-Macquart family) have something preconceived in them, which prevents them from becoming classical literary figures. One should look for an explanation to that partly Zola's theoretical views, partly in his personal nature and partly in the history of his novels.

Jean Macquart produces a rather positive impression. Later, the novel "la Debacle/the Downfall" will complete a picture of him and show that, unlike many, he fought with fortitude during the war and did not betray his country.

I found myself enthralled in this book, and I must credit Zola for his unflinching, often brutal realism. However, the story left me feeling very sad; there was so much blatant inhumanity. The tragic rape scene near the end left me horrified and numb, as did numerous passages throughout. Zola really captures a dark side of life in the country.