A review by jayisreading
Germinal by Émile Zola

challenging dark reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

Zola’s Germinal is not a novel that I would normally pick up on my own accord, especially because I’m not particularly interested in the subject matter (though, I guess the average reader probably won’t be that invested in mining in France during the 1800s). When it comes to personal enjoyment, I would say that the novel fell in the middle ground, and I didn’t love or hate it. I think what really won me over, though, was Zola’s socio-political commentary, especially if you take into consideration who and what he may have been engaging with during the period he worked on this novel.

Directly inspired by the miners’ strikes that occurred in the 1860s, Zola crafted a fictional version of a miners’ strike in Northern France to dig deep into class struggle, particularly the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie. There were other ideas that he considered as well, with I think the most surprising being the role of women in these spaces. I will say that the treatment of women in this novel was anything but great (to put it lightly), but I did appreciate Zola’s consideration of how women contributed to the labor movement. The living conditions that Zola described in Germinal were unbelievably bleak, but, in many ways, it did give him the chance to create powerful (even if, at times, heavy-handed) symbols reflecting on struggle and survival, particularly through his characters, notably Étienne and Catherine. On the note of his characters, I appreciated that Zola didn’t follow the good vs. evil model and, instead, chose to place them in murkier spaces.

Again, based on personal enjoyment alone, I would say that I don’t have any strong opinions and found the novel to be just okay. However, I have to fully acknowledge the richness of Zola’s symbolism, graphic details, and commentary in Germinal. I do think it’s worth picking this up, should you be able to handle the overwhelming bleakness, as it is a great exploration of class struggle while also giving a glimpse into how people such as Zola may have been reacting to Marxism. I was also a little surprised by his prose, which I found a bit different from his contemporaries. Relatedly, I thought it was more accessible to a modern reader who might be intimidated by nineteenth-century French literature, should that mean anything. 
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