Onze site gebruikt cookies om diensten te leveren, prestaties te verbeteren, voor analyse en (indien je niet ingelogd bent) voor advertenties. Door LibraryThing te gebruiken erken je dat je onze Servicevoorwaarden en Privacybeleid gelezen en begrepen hebt. Je gebruik van de site en diensten is onderhevig aan dit beleid en deze voorwaarden.
'It was the time when the rush for spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The cityhad become an orgy of gold and women.'The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world. Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable 'appetites' unleashed by the Second Empire(1852-70) and the transformation of the city by Baron Haussmann, the novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for money and lust for pleasure. The all-pervading promiscuity of the new Paris is reflected in the dissolute and frenetic lives of an unscrupulous propertyspeculator, Saccard, his neurotic wife Renee, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime.… (meer)
This book, La Curée (in English titled as The Kill), the second one in Émile Zola’s Rougon Macquart series, blew me out of my socks because of the topics it frankly deals with in 1871, when it was first published.
I mean: a stepmother and her stepson having a sexual affair, a gay footman having sex with the stableboys, a woman desiring to have sex with two men, a father visiting prostitutes together with his son. And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few more things.
That a novel like this was published during the second half of the nineteenth century is mind blowing. And next to addressing these daring topics, it’s also stunningly well written in a style that keeps you turning the pages.
But what this novel is essentially about, is greed. A man works himself up the ladder to richness and then cannot stop himself from getting more. He goes to lengths to earn more money, making victims (his wife, his friends, the poor) by the dozens. And he gets away with it. His wife, Renee, is also driven by greed, though in her case it’s not money but sex she’s after, and she too has no scruples to get it. In a time when sexual feelings of women were regarded as practically non existent to many men, Zola shows them all wrong. How shocked readers must have been!
A fantastic novel and a must read for lovers of nineteenth or English Victorian novels. I think that in England a book like this would have been unthinkable.
'It was the time when the rush for spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The cityhad become an orgy of gold and women.'The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world. Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable 'appetites' unleashed by the Second Empire(1852-70) and the transformation of the city by Baron Haussmann, the novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for money and lust for pleasure. The all-pervading promiscuity of the new Paris is reflected in the dissolute and frenetic lives of an unscrupulous propertyspeculator, Saccard, his neurotic wife Renee, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime.
I mean: a stepmother and her stepson having a sexual affair, a gay footman having sex with the stableboys, a woman desiring to have sex with two men, a father visiting prostitutes together with his son. And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few more things.
That a novel like this was published during the second half of the nineteenth century is mind blowing. And next to addressing these daring topics, it’s also stunningly well written in a style that keeps you turning the pages.
But what this novel is essentially about, is greed. A man works himself up the ladder to richness and then cannot stop himself from getting more. He goes to lengths to earn more money, making victims (his wife, his friends, the poor) by the dozens. And he gets away with it. His wife, Renee, is also driven by greed, though in her case it’s not money but sex she’s after, and she too has no scruples to get it. In a time when sexual feelings of women were regarded as practically non existent to many men, Zola shows them all wrong. How shocked readers must have been!
A fantastic novel and a must read for lovers of nineteenth or English Victorian novels. I think that in England a book like this would have been unthinkable.