Customer Reviews

Money

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This novel follows the exploits of Aristide Saccard, a financial wheeler-dealer in Second Empire Paris. His former wealth wiped away by investment schemes gone bad, Saccard looks for his next big windfall. Luckily, he meets a neighbor, Hamelin, an engineer with grand designs to develop railroads, mines, dams, and shipping companies in the Middle East. The engineer and the financial wizard join forces to make both their dreams come true. Saccard founds the Universal Bank to fund Hamelin's projects, and it becomes all the rage in the Paris Bourse (stock market). While Hamelin's intentions are noble, Saccard's primary interest in the venture is personal financial gain and self-aggrandizement. In order to push up his company's value, he manipulates figures illegally and lies to his investors.

Saccard is a personification of the greed and opportunism rampant in France at the time, and his unwise investors personify that period's growing mania for financial speculation. It's amazing how relevant the book is to this day. The Universal Bank could just as well be named Enron or Worldcom, and foreign investment in the Middle East is certainly a current concern. Another issue that Zola tackles in this book is anti-Semitism. Though Zola himself was not an anti-Semite, he makes Saccard a hater of Jews in order to depict the mind-set of many Parisians at that time. One of the functions of Saccard's Universal Bank is to create a repository of Catholic money to rival the Jewish-owned banks, an actual goal of some Parisian businessman of the time. Regardless of the historical social commentary, one can enjoy this novel purely for its intricately-drawn characters and its insights into human nature. I would caution that some of the financial strategy can be a little difficult for people (like me) who are not fully versed in the world of stocks and bonds.

This book is the 18th book in Zola's twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart series. Zola first introduced us to the character Aristide Saccard back in the second volume of the series, La Curée. L'Argent (aka Money) is a much better book than La Curée (aka The Kill), and it is not necessary to read that prior volume in order to understand or enjoy this book. By Zola standards I would not call this novel a masterpiece, but it's an excellent novel and deserves to be read.

Set in the heroic golden age of nineteenth century capitalism, this belated sequel to the second book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, "La Curée", tells you in Zola's inimitable style about how the stock market works and the psychology of market players. Nothing has really changed since it was written over a hundred years ago. Read it and you may avoid losing your life savings in some scam or other, or you may find some ideas for a scam of your own. You would not be the first, if some recent scandals are anything to go by. If you're Jewish you may not like some of the remarks made by the book's main character, Aristide, but remember Zola's honourable role in the Dreyfus affair only a few years later. Now go and check the stability of your bank while you've still got the chance.

"L'Argent/the Money" finishes up the story of Arstide Saccard; it takes over where the novel "La Curee/The Kill" leaves off. It shows the life in all its forms. The last two sentences of the novel give a philosophical description of the role of money and why so many vices are tied with it.

The novel shows how easy it was in those days to take a roller-coaster ride from poverty to richness and back to poverty. It narrates about early days of capitalism, when no antitrust regulations existed. One should also bear in mind that all the utopian talk of Sigizmund Busch about classless society and money becoming obsolete was seen (from the way it is conveyed in the novel) as daydreaming.

The novel walks through such important events of the XIXth century as: the Mexican expedition, building of the Suez Canal, the Austro-Italian War, the Prussian conquest of small duchies and the Paris World Exhibition of 1867. Shortly after all these events France was struck by the infamous Dreyfus Affair and the novel does a good job describing the atmosphere that led to it, because there is hardly a chapter where the main character does not make inflammatory statements about the Jews.

All in all, it is a classic novel, not only about the money, but about the humanity, as well.

'Money' may be said to rank among M. Zola's notable achievements... This is not surprising, as the book deals with a subject of great interest to every civilized community. And with regard to this English version, it may, I think, be safely said that its publication is well timed, for the rottenness of our financial world has become such a crying scandal, and the inefficiency of our company laws has been so fully demonstrated, that the absolute urgency of reform can no longer be denied

Prospective readers need not worry whether they're smart enough to comprehend the complex inner workings of the stock exchange in order to understand Zola's novel, "Money." Zola takes plenty of care to keep his readers close to him and his story-telling and to be clear, whether it be through repetition or through recharacterization or redescription. For example, while this reader did not quite understand the implications of starting a company with only 4/5ths of the necessary stock, the set-up that occurs in Chapters 1 and 2, he did understand that a company that's set up with only 4/5ths of the stock doesn't matter much since Zola lays before the reader the clear notion that a company buying its own shares is something that's against the law and Saccard, the anti-hero of this novel, the bank manager -- and the others who support him -- went ahead and did it any way! That's simply called fraud, and it is the subject that forms the molten core of action, the central plot. What's really important to understand the story Zola masterfully controls and makes abundantly clear.

Saccard, a money-dealer and former broker (and the anti-hero of this novel, as has already been mentioned) dreams of becoming "filthy" rich and playing the role of virtuous hero on the world-stage (for the poor and ignorant of this world, with an Ayn Rand-like industrial hope of superb commercial and corporate development in underdeveloped countries all over the globe), doing good to others meanwhile (in a Roman Catholic sort of way) with his (fraudulent and ill-gotten) gains as manager of a company called Universal Bank. Saccard's character is contrasted to and pitted against a Jew named Gunderman, also a money-dealer and broker, but someone who is not at all a dreamer like Saccard is, someone who also happens to play cunningly but who plays within the rules, unlike Saccard. Gunderman is a striking contrast to Saccard who is also a rabid anti-Semite simply by dint of Gunderman's working hard at what he does and owning real family values, while staying grounded and not dreaming of possibilities he cannot realistically give shape to, unlike Saccard.

Some people have touted that "Money" is supposed to be a kind of prophetic revelation about today's global economic situation or is perhaps a retelling of today's events, the financial collapse of so many banking institutions. Even while Zola seems to draw in parts of the globe well outside of Paris, France for his novel, writing of Africa and the Middle East in fairly breezy fashion when focusing on Saccard, Zola's imagination is totally local (Parisian) and not global in the least. Saccard, dreaming of himself to be on par with Napoleon in the realm of finance, not politics, is deluded in his perceptions, not Zola. In addition, the reader soon finds out that Saccard is not a representation of, say, a Rothschild, past or present; and neither is the Jewish broker, Gunderman, Saccard's enemy. Both men are quite mid-size representative men, so to speak, not the giants or behemoths of financial acumen and industry as are the Rothschilds or even a Warren Buffet.

However, there is this to be said about the novel in its relation to contemporary events: a clear outline of how fraud is perpetuated by financial institutions. You need a power-hungry liar (Saccard); someone to misdirect the press and write propaganda for the fraudulent company (Jantrou); and you need someone willing to be a willing go-between between government and business, trading inside information between legally separate agencies (Huret); and finally you need a naïve, dreaming, gullible public wanting something for nothing (us).

Still, once this reader discovered that the parallels between Zola's fictional events to today's open conspiracy by the international bankers -- outside of a clear depiction of fraud -- was only negligible at best, this reader, I say, started to lose interest. Jantrou is the public relations expert who manages the clever lies that are to be given to the media to pass off a fraud as a judicious enterprise, something that the major international banks have to do today too to pull off their ruses. Huret is the diplomat who uses stolen information in order to trade it off into a successful monetary outcome -- just like insider trading happens today between government and insurance companies, government and banks, government and non-governmental organizations, government and the military, while focusing on economics. A parallel is there and there are some edifying lessons from the novel for today's readers, but -- the parallel to today's events is not at all very deep, nor is it even wide enough, global enough to make a compulsive read for a contemporary, even while Zola seems to span the globe in his range of the economic ideas expressed. Zola is not a globalist. His imagination hadn't been trained to go that distance in the 19th century. His main character, Saccard, could be almost anyone from the New York Stock Exchange, even a Bernanke in the Federal Reserve System, but there are people who run Bernanke, and Zola doesn't even attempt to explore that fact nor even hint of it. His main players are, as I've already said, smaller than giants or behemoths of acquisition yet are well above the ordinary poker-player so as to attract interest.

Madame Caroline is a wonderfully depicted woman in so many scenes. She's memorable for her irrepressible joie de vivre despite quite despairing conditions -- until, for this reader, she is described by Zola as falling in love with Saccard. And then when her eyes are open to his chicanery and she still continues to have a weak spot for him, as a viable living character, she fell way below my radar into -- well, fiction, of the bad kind. Why does she love Saccard so deeply? We don't know. Why does she continue to love Saccard even when she knows he's defrauding everybody and plotting their ruin because of his egoism? We'll never know. This is Zola -- the naturalist writer. He never gets behind the characterizations he makes in order to explore motive. These people just ARE. They do what they do because they are who they are? Well, who are they really? Only figments, filaments, of Zola's imagination. [Note: A doctor-friend of mine, reading the novel with me, asserts that Zola does give motivation and reason for Madame Caroline's love of the power-mongerer, Saccard. She loves him for the good that he does and can do with all the money he hopes to acquire. She's right. Zola, with Madame Caroline, does give a reason, a motivation, unlike the rest of his other characters, including Saccard himself. However, Madame Caroline's motivation is highly subjective, even delusional. Saccard actually never does anything concretely good. She imagines him as doing good, and thus being good. Her Saccard is a figment of her own imagination and desires, just as all of Zola's characters are figments of his imagination and desires.]

The novel may be good according to some readers' interest, but it is certainly not excellent. The idea that this novel is a masterpiece is unthinkable. I've read other Zola novels that have much deeper insights into the human experience than this one. Therese Raquin, for instance. Germinal, for another. Somehow, for all its bluster, verbiage, and on-the-surface complexity, "Money" seems to touch only the surface of life. The reader comes away from her or his reading no wiser about why people do what they do than before the book was opened and she or he is no more knowledgeable about what really is the true nature of money, an idea never penetrated by Zola even though his novel uses the noun for its title.

I understand that this novel was made into an expensive movie in 1928. I think this novel would make a fabulous movie, but that's because it's an entertainment merely -- all surface. The first two chapters are wonderfully rich and cinematic, overflowing with possibilities and glamour and intrigue.

Another thing this reader didn't like about this particular novel is that here Zola shows he has no "inimitable style." It reads like a young apprentice writer's novel: there's hardly any penetrating characterization development; the plot is threadbare or one note, the equivalent of watching TV poker or the financial equivalent of a car-chase movie. Zola doesn't tell the reader how the stock market works really. He simply tells him or her how one fraudster worked in the stock market. Again, if you're Jewish and you think Saccard's anti-Semitic views are those of the author, then you're mistaking the latter for the former; they are not the same. Besides, as has already been stated, the one Jewish broker in the story, Gunderman, is actually a pretty decent guy, with family values, and he's not at all a fraud. The parallels between then and now are not drawn with any kind of deftness -- because the parallels are few. You need not know how the stock market works before you read this novel to know anything about how the Parisian stock market works. This is a work of fiction, dear readers. Finally, there is nothing "heroic" about the gilded age of wheelers and dealers here. The time-period depicted here was only "golden" for those who finally got to be top of the heap and it was only for a moment.

Finally, what really seems rotten is that the publishers decided to print the novel at this time -- while using the same old translation from 1902! Printing this novel makes a pretty easy buck! All they did was clean up some of the typos from the 1902 edition.

It's not the "inefficiency" of our "company laws" today (as one Amazon reviewer here suggested) that has caused our financial woes. As the fraudsters in "Money" disgustingly make simple, fraudsters simply work around the laws -- no matter what the laws are or how "efficient" they intend to be. I can give this novel four stars because Zola tried to depict his society on an extraordinarily vast or large canvas. That's quite a difficult thing to pull off. It's just too bad that the story is actually only so-so.

The novel ends with Madame Caroline, her face still young while under a crown of snowy hair, thinking about all she's been through in her old age. She thinks of her love for Saccard as filth, but then wonders why money should be blamed for such shame. She asks herself if love is less filthy than money, less filthy than life itself. It is a filthy and revolting inner dialogue that Zola seemed, in the end, to drudge up for Madame Caroline out his a** by which to make an end to his parableless but prolix conjurations.