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A review by hadeanstars
Germinal by Émile Zola
5.0
Powerful, brooding, brilliant, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. The 19th century really was the golden age of literature, and the French produced so many works of genius. I would rate Zola as being on a par with Hugo and Proust. This novel is about a mining community that engages in a protracted struggle for fair pay and conditions with their employers, although the struggle soon widens and becomes desperate. Zola uses this as the basis for a broad critique of rapacious capitalism, and the indignities it inflicts on the powerless and innocent.
There are uncomfortable future echoes that make this story still relevant today. Capitalism has not changed, but protections have been put into place to curb the worst excesses of the greedy. But this novel really makes you think about the importance of those protections at a time where unions are being effectively outlawed, if not by statute, then by public and corporate pressure.
This novel is very gritty and dark, and lies somewhere between Dickens’s Hard Times and Tressel’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It builds to an inevitable and sickening catharsis, dragging you, reluctantly to its conclusion. You can’t help but be shocked and appalled, yet you cannot put it down. A work of absolute genius.
There are uncomfortable future echoes that make this story still relevant today. Capitalism has not changed, but protections have been put into place to curb the worst excesses of the greedy. But this novel really makes you think about the importance of those protections at a time where unions are being effectively outlawed, if not by statute, then by public and corporate pressure.
This novel is very gritty and dark, and lies somewhere between Dickens’s Hard Times and Tressel’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It builds to an inevitable and sickening catharsis, dragging you, reluctantly to its conclusion. You can’t help but be shocked and appalled, yet you cannot put it down. A work of absolute genius.