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The Kill (Oxford World's Classics)

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"La Curée" is a hunting term in French that can't be easily translated. It's the moment when all the hounds and hunters have trapped or treed their prey and are closing in for "The Kill". The bloodthirtsy hounds of Zola's "La Curée" are the unscrupulous capitalist speculators of the French Second Empire (1852-1870) of Louis Napoleon, whose greed and decadence are unleashed by the first great "urban renewal" of modern times, the expropriation of huge swathes of Paris for the constructing of the boulevards. "The Kill" is a novel of Passions, of the lust for money and of sexual lust, but the most fiery Passion of all is Zola's own passionate hatred of the Second Empire, which he portrays as morally and aesthetically rotten to the core.

Was there ever a novel before "The Kill" in which every character is completely odious? Even in Zola's previous novel - The Fortune of the Rougons - there were a couple of sympathetic innocents, but the three principal actors of "The Kill" are loathsome from start to finish. Aristide Saccard is the son of the Pierre Rougon who pounced on Napoleon III's coup d'etat to 'lift' the Rougons from poverty in that first novel. Maxime is Aristide's effete son by his first wife in the village of Plassans, whom we met in "The Fortune" but whose death in "The Kill" affords Aristide his first opportunity to swindle his way to wealth in Paris. Renée is Aristide's second, much younger wife, whose dowry provides that opportunity. The novel "The Kill" is a tightly choreographed ballet, a 'pas de trois' of deception and seduction danced by these three despicable people, each one aiming to extract as much 'blood' from the other two as possible. In the latter chapters, in fact, explicit mention is made of "Phedre", that classic of the French theater, a drama of incestuous desire and suicide. One could read Zola's "La Curée" as a bold trope on the story of Phedre.

What pleasure can there be in reading a novel about three equally hateful characters in a menage a trois? You won't be able, dear reader, to take sides. The pleasure is all in the art of Zola's writing, and perhaps in the fervor of his historical denunciation of the Second Empire, which does seem surprisingly to resemble the state of things in "The World's Only Superpower" of 2010. The promiscuity and extravagance of Zola's Paris are not unmatched in today's America.

"The Kill" is an architectural masterpiece, a novel as precisely constructed as the Eiffel Tower and as ornate as the façade of any church or chateau in France. The first chapter, indeed, is a kind of extravagant façade of description, page after page of opulence -- clothing, carriages, furniture, palatial dwellings, all the trappings of excess and insatiable lust that swirl around Renée and Maxime (stepmother & stepson) like objects of Bacchanalia tossed in a tornado. Later in the novel, when the 'inevitable' occurs between Maxime and Renée, Zola portrays their ecstasy with the same brilliant indirection, describing the sensuous, narcotic luxury of Renée's bedroom rather than the sordid physical actions that occur in it. One can be seduced -- over-stimulated -- by Zola's powers of description. I read "La Curée" in French, by the way, and I relished this first chapter so much as poetic language that I found myself reading it aloud, something I rarely do.

There are twenty novels in Zola's "Rougon-Macquart" series, his epic depiction of French society and history through the interconnected lives of the descendants of two families from the Provençal village of Plassans. I've read and reviewed a couple of the later novels out of order, specifically "The Debacle" and "The Masterpiece". Eventually I may have to challenge Master Zola on a certain kind of double standard of sexual morality. In "The Kill", he is implacable in his condemnation of dissolute, decadent sexual frenzy among the "upper" classes of wealth and power. In "The Masterpiece", portraying the Bohemian lifestyle of the Impressionist painters and writers, he is far less minatory, far more indulgent. But hey, don't I feel the same ambivalence myself? Oddly enough, the original serialization of "La Curée" was interrupted in 1871 - censored by the government - ostensibly for its "immorality", and Zola was widely perceived as a 'prurient' writer, especially by British and American readers. In fact, in "The Kill" at least, he's as censorious as Savonarola or Jonathan Edwards.

This Oxford edition translation by Brian Nelson is the first since the end of the 19th C. I looked it over in a bookstore. It seems quite readable and representative of Zola's craft. I don't think you need to have read "The Fortune of the Rougons" or any other of Zola's books to appreciate "The Kill". A little knowledge of French history, and a tourist's visual impression of Paris, would facilitate your appreciation, but even those things are not necessary. "The Kill" is an awfully good novel.

The title of Nr.2 in Zola's 20 volume series about the Rougon- Macquart clan is purely metaphorical. It is a hunting expression and refers to the moment at the end of the hunt when the dogs get to devour the left-overs of the prey.

Zola was a fervid hater of the regime and time of Napoleon III. We are looking at the so-called second empire in France, which lasted for 2 decades, from 1851 to 1870. Ironically, the demise was helped by Prussia's Bismarck, who started the 2nd Empire in Germany on the basis of the victory over Napoleon.

Zola wrote the book at the end of the 2 decades, and it was published during the early time of the next epoch, a republic. Zola was not generally greeted with enthusiasm. Some considered his book vulgar and obscene. By modern standards, that sounds a bit overstated.

The story starts around 1860, so it is not chronologically the next in the big epos, just the second one written and published.

The story of this novel focuses on Aristide, the youngest son of Pierre Rougon, chief villain of volume 1 and family `patriarch', if a word with such positive connotations is appropriate for this kind of selfish rogue. Another son has made it as a politician and has entered the cabinet as a minister. Aristide has struck it rich as a speculator. He has a young second wife and an adult son from his first marriage.

We start with a look at the life of the rich in Paris. We join a coach ride, and then a dinner party at Aristide's mansion. Zola spends a lot of effort on describing the park, the streets, the traffic, the architecture of the house, the interior decoration. High point may be the green house: Zola gives us a detailed listing and description of the plants in there. Of course this serves a purpose: with Zola, we do not admire the ostentation, the `bastard culture' of the time.

The young wife is bored to distraction with being a pillar of society, and she envies the lives of more adventurous and honest women, like courtesans or actresses. We smell early that an affair with her step son is brewing.

Aristide's métier is speculation in property, and his world are the businesses which benefit from public investments like Napoleon's rebuilding of Paris. Corruption is ubiquitous.

Aristide has started his career as a government employee thanks to a job arranged by his brother the minister. He has access to information about the Haussmann modernization plans. He needs a starting capital to use his insights. He obtains that thanks to a convenient demise of his first wife and an opportunistic second marriage, which allows him to get started big.

So the two legs of the story are a criminally acquired fortune and a frustrated rich woman failing to find purpose in life. The novel works well and I liked it better than volume 1.

I want to reserve my judgment about the historical merits of the Paris renovation. Zola may have been too radical with his condemnation. Based on the origin of the regime, his hatred is certainly understandable. The corrupt culture, if accurately described, is surely disgusting. On the other hand, wasn't the rebuilding of Paris with its broad boulevards and its rearranged arrondissements a good thing, after all? Need to read more about it.

This book is full of excess and scheming. Lovers are passed around like currency, and debauchery becomes commonplace. Zola's portrait of Paris during the Second Empire is defined by indulgence.

It's a novel about a city being reinvented. Everywhere houses are being torn down to make way for new thoroughfares and elaborate building projects while the government reimburses the owners for their losses--a system ripe with abuses as speculators purchase property they know will be claimed and make inflated demands for compensation.

Financial gain and sexual gratification are the only motives. But, in The Kill, rapid growth and radical change come at a cost--not only financial, but moral. And the outcome is devastating.

This otherwise excellent translation is somewhat marred in the Kindle edition by the lack of active links to the endnotes. This makes it tedious to refer to the notes while reading. This is a very common problem, particularly in the Oxford World's Classics series. The publishers have made only the minimum effort necessary to produce a Kindle version. A very little extra work would have made a much better product, but few publishers seem to take any pride at all in their Kindle eBooks.

The first chapter of THE KILL is a tour de force. It opens in the Bois de Boulogne, a forest remade into a drawing room, and travels the new boulevards of the Second Empire to end at the Aristide (Rougon) Saccard mansion. There, it burrows through its spacious rooms and ends in the hothouse, a man made structure refashioned into a wild place. As a set piece, it is simultaneously a masterpiece of naturalism and a perfectly-balanced metaphor.

The novel is most interesting when it is describing the broad strokes (of demolition and rebuilding) which made Paris the city it is today. Zola doesn't see the new boulevards as progressive, but as the arteries that would allow a totalitarian regime to mobilize troops to the outskirts of the city. He also doesn't see the benefits of deficit spending to achieve these goals.

Many modern readers may find his attitude toward the lasciviousness of the age overly-moralizing, and not entirely in keeping with his stated purpose of naturalism. Chapter VI, in particular, carries too great a burden of metaphor, causing much damage to the structure of the novel. Zola was 31 when he wrote THE KILL, and it contains mistakes that his more mature novels do not.

As for the title, LA CURÉE, readers will be well-advised to have read HIS EXCELLENCY before reading THE KILL (as Zola himself wished--see his intro to DOCTOR PASCAL, or my review at The Fortune of the Rougons (Rougon-Macquart)). The preferred second novel of the series contains a detailed description of this peculiar ritual of the hunt, in which the butcher's offal is given to the dogs. As Pierre Rougon's third son gobbles up real estate and cheats even his own family in the process of gaining wealth, the image of those dogs fighting each other for scraps becomes more and more vivid.

In The Kill, Zola takes us to 19th century Paris. At the time, Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to reorganize, sanitize and embellish the capital city. Zola hated these transformations, and the speculations the project gave way to. For him, Paris was a torn out game animal delivered to starving dogs. In The Kill, we're following Aristide Saccard. Everything Saccard touches turns into gold. But everyone around him gets corrupted, especially his young wife Renée and his son Maxime.

The Kill is the second volume of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, the "natural and social study of a family under the Second Empire". With his meticulous realistic approach, and one of the richest and most sensual literary styles, Zola remains an extremely modern author.

[ASIN:0199536929 The Kill (Oxford World's Classics)]]

This edition has thorough notes to supplement the text and is a very well done translation.