Customer Reviews

La Joie de Vivre (French Edition)

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Number 12 in Zola's Rougon Macqart series is more of a proper novel than it's predecessor: 'Ladies' happiness', the story of the groundbreaking invention of the department store, had been more a social study and more historical source material than a novel in the proper sense.

'Joy of Life', with it's counter-intuitive title in view of the less than happy plot, is a private tale, set in a family on the wild west coast of France. As far as I know it is the only novel by Zola that has the ocean as a subject, even if largely or entirely seen from the point of view of a land lubber. The sea is an enemy, a threat, not a life giver nor a source of adventure and romance.

Unfortunately, I have read the introduction first, in the French pocket book edition with Munch's Girls on a Bridge on the cover.
It conditioned me to read the novel as if it was a sibling of Ibsen's play Ghosts. Not that it is a wrong idea, but I would rather have come up with that idea on my own. Of course this comparison also caused the choice of the cover illustration. Munch would have matched Ibsen better than Zola though. And the girls on the bridge are an odd mismatch to the story from the battered coastal village.
Another comparison made by the introduction is to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, insofar as they can both be seen as novels of failure.

You see what I mean when I write about the counter-intuitive title. How can a drama of failure and family ghosts be called joy of life?
This is thanks to the book's heroine: little Pauline walks in from the cast of the Belly of Paris, she is an orphan, the butchers' child, and comes to live and grow up with relatives on the coast. She is a miracle of a positive character: well meaning, balanced, happy, self-contained, strong, intelligent, without being too perfect, as she has her flaws too. Like jealousy; but isn't she right to be jealous? Her main fault: she falls for the good for nothing son of her hosts, and she lets herself be robbed blind by them.

She is the best that could have happened to the mean, miserable, jealous, negative, joyless, greedy, heartless family that take her in, but even Pauline can't save these awful people from self-destruction. And she can't help letting them exploit her and then discard her.
This is one of the lesser known volumes in the series. I like it rather a lot. Through Pauline it pretends to argue against Schopenhauerian pessimism, but the positive surface attitude doesn't convince. We are born to die, after all, and there is no need to get excited about life, or is there?