Customer Reviews

The Kill

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This is the second book in the Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels that traces 4 generations of a family with a book about each family member. You don't have to read the other books to read one since each stands on its own, but once you start, you may, like me, never be able to stop.

This new translation really helps bring this book to life for the modern reader. Most of Zola's novels were translated when written over a hundred years ago. These original translations are usually the only choice English-language readers have. While good, they are somewhat dated, and a new translation of a Zola novel is an event of great importance. Arthur Goldhammer does a wonderful job of both being true to the time it was written and yet sensitive to the modern reader. There are occasional footnotes to explain some terms, but they are not bothersome nor do they interupt the flow of the work.

In The Kill Zola takes the reader to the Paris of the Second Empire where Napoleon III is transforming the city into a modern marvel. Large, wide, straight new boulevards are being built to provide access to the the heart of the city.

Many people are getting rich in real estate speculation. The protagonist Aristide Saccard, has come to Paris to make a fortune for himself. He knows he can do it if he could just find someone to provide him money to get started. He hears of a rich daughter who needs a husband since she was raped and is pregnant, and strikes a deal with her and her family to a marriage of convenience. With the money he gets from marrying Renee Saccard, he builds a fortune on shady deals and speculation.

Renee is a bored sensualist who takes lovers and attends all the parties she can. She is left to raise Aristide's teenage son, Maxime, another sensualist, who today would be called a Metrosexual. Together, the two explore the sexually liberated world of 19th century Paris and eventually become lovers.

Character development and portrayal are excellent in The Kill. Zola shows us the inner workings of this amoral family and the world in which they travel. Although the ending is a bit weak, the characters and plot are excellently developed.

This is the second time I have read this book and I love the new translation. Not Zola's best work, but a very strong novel worth reading.

First of all, this translation is very readable. If that is your concern in whether to purchase (I'd rather read a bad novel than a good novel in a poor translation), then fear not. As to the novel itself, I have begun reading the Rougon-Macquart cycle in order, so this is my second book.

I found the style of The Fortune of the Rougons carried over into this book, so the text is readable and wellplotted. I still found characterization a bit of a problem. The three main characters - Aristide, Renee, and Maxime - are rendered very well. So are a few supporting characters. For example, we get to know Sidonie Rougon who was only a footnote in the last book. However, most of the other characters are names and positions and not much else. This could be construed as serving Zola's purpose of illustrating the shallow lives of these people, but it can also get to be confusing.

As another reviewer mentioned, there's a lot of decriptive passages relating to furnishings and interiors. Again, these may serve to instill the sense of superficiality, but the descriptions can slow the narrative. However, one description (of Renee's bedroom and dressing room) appears to be a method of commenting on the psychology of her sexual relationship with her stepson rather than just sheer description. I found this an interesting device.

All the characters are bored and, despite having gained immense wealth, which if you read the last book you know was Aristide's all-consuming goal, one gets the feeling it is all for nothing. These people are consumers that make a cloud of locusts look restrained. Despite possessing hundreds of thousands of francs and "rivers of gold," they always seem one wrong step from bankruptcy. The final lines of the book underscore the sheer waste these people's lives represent.

Searching for fulfillment while being morally incapable of attaining it, I couldn't help feeling Zola's characters resonated with present day CEOs and executives behind debacles like the Enron scandal. Zola's depiction of the Saccard family is like turning over a rock and analyzing the squirming, slimy depravity of people obsessed with acquisition, consumers whose appetites are never satisfied.

In a sense, I get the feeling Zola's social criticism of the Second Empire will be a bit like looking at the Decline of Rome. And both speak to modern American culture.

So I picked up this novel for two reasons: 1) I read Therese Raquin and thought it brilliant, 2) The cover was appealing. This is the first and only novel I've read in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and, to be honest, I'm not rushing to read any more, but...I'm glad I read this one.

The focus of the story, set in 2nd Empire Paris, revolves around Renee, the daughter of "old money" who marries into "new money": Aristide Saccard and his son Maxime. Aristide is a ruthless financier and Maxime is his dashing but effeminate son. Of course, the young Renee begins an affair with Maxime, an affair that is characterized by her lustful longing for some real connection to life. The affair is quickly regretted by Maxime but becomes an obsession of Renee's...

...And that's when the novel becomes absolutely brilliant. We watch the tortuous descent of Renee into the madness that we all expected to happen, but this madness' climax (chapter 6) is one of the great feats of modern literature.

The setting of this climax is a costume ball of ridiculous extravagance. I can't adequately describe the satirical brilliance of this scene, but its absurdity ratchets up in intensity when Renee enters wearing...not much. I also don't want to spoil it.

To make a long story short, she goes insane, not that we didn't expect it. Why read it? Because this climactic scene is itself an epic of nasty grandeur. Renee manages to be both sympathetic and abhorrent, leaving the reader to ask, "What just happened?"

Don't get me wrong; this novel is boring and overly descriptive at first, but the descriptions slowly become more symbolically meaningful, as, for instance, when Renee's dressing and bathing room takes on the qualities of a vulva. And again I stress, the vividness and symbolism of the climax is INTENSE and marvelous.

I'd recommend this novel for readers with A) patience and B) a keen eye for masterful construction. Otherwise, read the next Dan Brown novel (not that I've actually read anything by him). Oh, and if you're both pornographic and literary minded, thumbs up.

"La Cur(e')e/the Kill" tells about Pierre Rougon's youngest son Aristide Saccard building a fortune for himself. As it is described in the first Rougon-Macquart novel "la Fortune des Rougons/the Fortune of the Rougons" Arstide had not been able to predict at the decisive moment the victory of the Empire and therefore decided not to build a political career for himself, but instead to become rich through fraudulent speculations. Aristide Saccard is a character that embodies traits of many associates of Napoleon III. We see some insights into how the city of Paris was changing its appearance late in the XIXth century and what role were associates and supporters of Napoleon III playing in it. We also see that the Second Empire produced not only tenacious and active predators, like most of the Aristide Saccard's encirclement, but also spoiled and coddled parasites. Such are Aristide Saccard's oldest son Maxime and second wife Renee.

That is all if viewed independently of the Rougon-Macquart epic. If to view this novel as a part of the Rougon family history, it just makes it more complete. We also learn how Aristide Saccard's sister Sidonie earns her living by exploiting human weaknesses. Aristide Saccard's brother Eugene Rougon is also a character of this novel, though appears very sporadically here. Basically, however, most of the ideas of this novel are better conveyed in the subsequent Rougon-Macquart novels.

Last, but not least, the story of Aristide Saccard is far from over; there is a lot more to come in the novel "l'Argent/the Money".

Censored in 1871 when it was published and out of print since the 1950s, this is the first translation of The Kill in more than a century-and the effort was well worth it. It is a novel of a scheming family of three Parisians during France's Second Empire: Aristide Rougon, an ambitious, wicked real estate speculator; his young second wife, Renee, who's vacuous quest for pleasure is in its own way as destructive as her husband's quest for riches; and Maxime, Aristide's son and Renee's son-in-law, an idle rich young man of privilege. No one of the protagonists here are very sympathetic, and their rise and fall-while no surprise to the reader, certainly yields some very engaging and delightful storytelling by Zola.

For those familiar with Paris, the rapidly changing face of the city during tin the 1850s and 60s will be particularly engaging. During this construction boom, vast thoroughfares are being built as masses of homes and buildings are being torn down to remake the Paris into a modern capital. On this level, The Kill works as the story demolition of the ancient city by the unscrupulous movers and shakers of the day. Zola, often described as a naturalist, is a master of description, and thanks to this excellent new translation, the novel does not show it's age at all.

This edition was an amazing read. When I read another version about 2 years ago, I thought the book was good but now that the text has been updated, I cannot tell you how good it is! Well, I guess I just did. There was so much sex omitted from the version I read, I didn't recognize it.This edition is great and I'm sure very close to what Zola intended.

This is, indeed, a loveless novel, one in which no character seems very redeemable and in which only one, Renee, as the once-abused, now-abusing, and finally discarded plaything of powerful or insipid men, ever even comes close.

The patriarch, Aristide Sacard (nee Rougon) arrives in Paris in 1851 on the scent of plunder. Writes Zola: "He inhaled, the breath, vague as yet, that rose from the great city, that breath of the budding empire, laden already with odors of alcoves and financial hells, with the warm effluvia of sensuality. The faint fumes that reached him told him that he was on the right scent, that the game was scudding before him, that the great imperial hunt, the hunt after adventures, women, and millions, was at last about to commence."

But to make money, you need money. Aristide gets his in the form of a dowry when he takes the beautiful Renee, ten years his junior, in exchange for a dowry that will enable him to commence his wildly fraudulent, often laughably complex speculative schemes. As a potential mate, Renee's currency has been debased by the fact that she was previously raped and that she is a member of a family who views her violation not with indignation but with fear for its scandal-causing potential. Renee eventually begins a sexual relationship with Maxime, Aristide's debauched son, ten years her junior, a useless, empty-headed young roue so free of the restraining fetters of decency that we're told that he "had vices before he had desires." Renee is fired by the transgressive nature of her lust for Maxime, but this at least betrays a residual awareness of the fact of boundaries, an awareness that makes her, curiously, the most moral of the novel's three main characters. Around this trio of powerfully rendered near-reprobates, you have a swirl of consumption, debauchery and plunder best captured near the end of the novel at a banquet in which Zola portrays the participants as behaving more like beasts than like people.

This is a world on holiday from history, one in which you can change your name to abolish your past, and can proceed, in the name of rapine and progress, to carve up an ancient city, the better to enable the usurping Napoleon III to pretend, as all upstart rulers must, that history begins...wait for it...now.

So, what redeems this horrid and dehumanizing picture? What makes a novel so teeming with incorrigibles worth even entertaining -- especially when you consider the novel's early scenes of lengthy and painfully detailed description do, to be honest, threaten initially to drag the early part of the novel down?

Well, first, there's Zola's incredible ability to make three-dimensional characters leap from the page with a terrible believability. There is the fact that, once you get past those dull passages early in the book, the novel leaps ahead toward its suspenseful denouement at a pace that makes your head spin and that never again threatens to lose you. And finally, most importantly, there the quality of the prose, mesmerizing, beautifully poetic, moral, and always equal to the sensual universe that it seeks to take on.

Bottom line: You will be startled that you like this novel and you will not be sorry that you read it.

First of all, let me say that I love the work of Émile Zola. I have read all twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart saga, and I have to say that in my opinion this is the worst book in the series. The plot revolves around a love triangle between Aristide Saccard (born Aristide Rougon), his second wife Renée, and his son Maxime by his previous marriage. The story takes place in Paris, as Saccard is undertaking a series of shady dealings to amass his fortune. I've always felt that Zola's brand of Naturalism, with its hyper-realistic accumulation of sensory detail, works better when he's dealing with the lower classes than with rich Parisians. In this book his observational thoroughness takes the form of long detailed descriptions of elegant dinner parties and lavishly furnished mansions. All this opulence goes to illustrate the pervasive greed and decadence of the times, but its still rather dull to read through. I imagine the love triangle itself had some shock value for readers of its time, but not so for today's reader. It's hard to take an active interest in any of the three main characters, since they are all so unlikeable. By unlikeable I don't just mean that they're morally reprehensible; they're also not very interesting. Renée is prone to tedious histrionics. Maxime is an ineffectual bore. Saccard is by far the most interesting of the three, but Zola doesn't give him as much ink as the other two. Zola develops the Saccard character much more fully in the far better novel entitled Money (L'Argent). French history enthusiasts will be interested in Saccard's financial endeavors. At a time when Napoleon III and Baron Hausmann are tearing down neighborhoods to make way for grand boulevards, Saccard uses insider information and a knack for wheeling and dealing to profit from all the destruction. I think this novel should only be read by those completists who want to read the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle. For anyone else, there are so many other far-better Zola books (Germinal, The Earth, L'Assomoir, The Debacle, Pot-Bouille, to name a few); don't waste your time on this one.

I am a big fan of all of Zola's novels. He had the wonderful ability to grab your attention immediately with rich descriptions both of the characters and the environment in which they operate. This particular novel can be read on many levels. But the thing that attracted me was the emphasis on business and in particular the real estate business. There is also a great deal of detail on the fashion industry including wonderful descriptions of the clothing worn by the rich and influential.
With all this as the background, there is a gripping melodramatic plot which would out do any HBO series. If you like and appreciate Mad Men you will love The Kill.