Nana [Hardcover]

Emile Zola (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2002

The story of Nana, a child of the Parisian slums, actress, and courtesan who uses her sexuality to amass great wealth and ruin her lovers, offers a shattering portrait of decadence among the wealthy and powerful of nineteenth-century France. Reissue.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This rather risque novel?for 1880 that is?tells the story of ruthless protagonist Nana's rise from the gutter to the height of Parisian society. The book's heavy allusion to sexual favors caused it to be denounced as pornography upon publication, which, of course, made it a big hit.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"The translation...is fluid and true to the text. The A.G. Stevens cover print is an excellent choice." --Roy Arthur Swanson, Univ. of Wisconsin
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 511 pages
• Publisher: North Books (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582871841
• ISBN-13: 978-1582871844
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,416,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lesser Known Masterpiece But Must Be Acknowledged, April 5, 2003

By 

Rachel Garret (Beverly Hills) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nana (Mass Market Paperback)

Emile Zola is credited to have written the first "modern" French novels, that is to say, novels about contemporary subject matter and society, written in a natural style, which is why he is called a Naturalist writer. He was a very observant man, with an eye for detail and realistic dialogue and scenarios. He was a friend of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, who himself was considered to be a modern artist for his photographic style of paintings. Emile Zola's greatest novel has got to be Nana.

Far from the sugary and innocent Gigi story by Gabrielle Colette which would come later, Nana takes place as the French Second Empire comes to a close. From 1852 to 1870, France became a capitalistic Gilded Age, a time in which men and women would stop at nothing to make it into high society. The decadence of the period is captured, as well as the poverty and decaying morals. It would not be long before Emperor Louis Napoleon III lost the Franco Prussian War (1870-1871) and the empire collapsed. Nana is the daughter of a poor laundress- a washer woman from the country. She becomes a courtesan, a high class prostitute with many wealthy and powerful clients. These include financiers and even a count. Nana has an influence over all the men she becomes involved with, and they are smitten by her, offering her homes and material benefits from her ... favors. In the end, Nana becomes a symbol for the ... society of Emile Zola's time. This novel is a good read for fans of Zola's Naturalistic style and should be read prior to his "The Debacle" which deals with the Franco Prussian War.

Nana became the subject for a Manet painting. The book and the painting shocked the stuffy Salon society of Paris, especially because Nana is so blatant in her ...feminine powers over men. But the novel is excellent, a masterpiece of French literature, a critique on the ridiculous level of poverty at the time. Mothers were willing to sell their daughters into prostitution. Nana, however much a hold she has over the men, cannot get the one thing she truly wants- a place in decent French society. She was always seen as a courtesan with no real ladylike qualities. They were wrong. Nana is a great character, and Emile Zola takes us to that time with such precison and power that we are as if in a time machine transported to those French streets and to those brothel bedrooms. He writes without any hold bars. His novels should be made into films. I suggest this reading material for any fan of French writers. If you like Honore De Balzac, Gustav Flaubert and the time period of the Second French Empire, this is your book.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars indictment of decadence, November 17, 2001

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nana (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This novel employs a courtesan, Nana, to condamn the decadence of late 2nd Empire France (1852-1870). Arising from a family ravaged by alcoholism and abuse, the great beauty Nana becomes a celebrity in theatre and then as the mistress of the high aristocracy and bourgeous. At her core, she is a devourer, empty of anything but the will to suck whatever she can out of anyone who comes near. She ruins the fortunes of numerous men with frivolous demands for things she barely wants, and Zola in the process illuminates how they made their careers and were ruined by their appeites for this woman, who becomes an archetypal destuctive force. It is indeed a bleak and severe indictment of an entire society: you learn how celebrity worked in it, from the bottom up and back down again. Her sexuality is omnivorous, the men her willing victims for a mention in the Figaro gossip columns. (As Zola put, "les hommes suivent une chienne qui n'est pas en chaleur.")

Zola makes for fascinating reading, as does Balzac, for the wider tableau he paints. The writers are similar, except that Zola was a far more careful writer. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find any characters you can like or admire, which makes the cynicism and condamnations overbearing and hard to get through at times. There are numerous inventions in it that became classic, like "blond venus" and "golden fly". This adds to it as a glorious classic novel.

In a wider sense, this is one of the central novels in Zola's cycle on the "natural history" of an extended family, the Rougon-Macquart. It is based on a crude kind of Darwinist sociology, a kind of reasoning that was in its infancy when he wrote and which later culminated in Freud and Durkheim. THat is another level that is quite fascinating, a philosophical cycle of novels mixing biological science and Schopenauer, all deeply pessimistic and determinist.

Recommended, but it takes perserverence and a strong stomach to finish it.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars gender-reversal during the decline of the Second Empire, October 19, 2004

By 

P. Kufahl - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nana (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

In this novel, one of Zola's five or six "great books" about life during the Second Empire of France, we see a great number of men fall under the destructive influence of Nana, a demimonde who rose to fame from the backstreets of Paris. Nana is a prostitute, performer, socialite and celebrity all in one, making for a massive force of destruction. While every bit as earthy (and then some) as "L'Assommoir," this story is not quite as grim; depending on your sense of humor, it is also funnier.

For 1880, the descriptions of Nana's numerous trysts, games and affairs are, um, rather progressive, but this is a result of Zola's "naturalist" style. He collected copious notes on real figures at the time, and stood by the accuracy of his details. Nana did actually exist as a demimonde (or maybe a few), hastening the decadence of Napoleon III's France.

The back cover misleadingly advertises this story is a "poem of male desires," when it is Nana's desires and ambitions which drive the plot and dominate the imagery. Like no other book that I've read, "Nana" reverses the gender roles of its characters; with a fair amount of cross-dressing, homosexuality, physical abuse and assorted perversions. There are some dramatic scenes of degradation of Nana's men which are either 1.) some measure of revenge on men (Nana's mother experienced a lot of abuse in "L'Assommoir"), 2.) revenge on the wealthy, or 3.) expressions of boredom. Fans of "Fear Factor" might appreciate.

Zola's themes have a lot of parallels today: decadence, fear of aging, and destructive affairs (look at what a divorce proceeding did to General Electric's share price). I had no problem with the translation by Mr. Holden, and the story is certainly not boring. "Nana" is probably not for anyone, certainly not for younger readers, but it deserves its reputation as a great book.