Currently reading L'assommoir, and despite the first pages being boring, I quickly overcame it and started enjoying it, and now I think I understand why he is praised in France.
/lit/izens what do you think ?
What does?
Currently reading L'assommoir, and despite the first pages being boring, I quickly overcame it and started enjoying it, and now I think I understand why he is praised in France.
/lit/izens what do you think ?
J'Accuse wasn't good.
Because he was unbased deffending a israelite.
The israelite was innocent
The actual culprit was an Italian
No, I have no problem with israelites. I hate it because of Sorel. I just can't stand this fake kumbaya.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/sorel/1908/dreyfus-revolution.htm
I honestly don’t know why zoomers try to read. It’s just not for you, buddy, nothing personal but your brain is not designed for this. Stick to tiktoks and Black “music”.
We have word where we're from called "Pederčino glupa, mater ti jebem, nadam se da ti se ker posere u tvoj krevet prije nego što ideš spavat. Tvoja cura te definitivno rogovala, pička ti materina ma tko si ti da mi kažeš da ne čitam govnaru jedan, ma nek ti se da da pročitaš jebeni riječnik, pizdo" I hope you have nice night, friend.
obsessed
Zola is great. The mines flooding in Germinal is and amazing bit of writing.
Stylistically he's great but thematically he's unbelievably dull.
That is naturalism, theme is a vague idea which is not stated, just explored through situation.
Better than Balzac, but he’s still not my thing.
“Life sucks and then you die, and also alcoholism bad”, is a pretty uninteresting subject matter, especially when that makes up 90% of his writing. Well, that and autistically detailed descriptions of food.
>Better than Balzac
elaborate
I just find Zola’s prose more engaging and flowery, even though the subject matter doesn’t interest me at all.
I don’t care for stories that are just pure misery porn without at least some kind of “light at the end” for the characters or some grander meaning beyond just pure nihilism.
That is not his subject matter, the naturalist put theme/interpretation more on the reader, they provide the environment.
For me it is that Balzac has too much of the romantic/realist in him, one foot in two very different worlds and it creates dissonance. Essentially the same issue Zola saw in Balzac. Balzac is still good and very much worth reading.
Weirdly, I always felt Zola was more of the romantic, because his work has way more overt symbolism and works also have a running theme of characters meeting poetic/ironic fates.
With romantic I was referring too the tendency toward the bourgeois myopia and the weird reversal of the noble savage, casting the well off as the everyman. But Balzac had to work within the times if he wanted to be read and he made Zola possible.
He's one of my favorites, I read him in college, L'assomoir literally made me gave up drinking. Another great one of his is La Débâcle, it's about the war with Prussia in his usual naturalist style, sort of documenting the moronicness of war
That's nice I will try to read that one too then.
It is not that contrasted though I think, from what I read he always has quite a distant point of view regarding the "dirtiness" and alcoholism of poor people.
I fricking love Zola. Everyone's horny as shit, there's always a bad ending. His ideas on class always peeks through, but I do think he does a great of capturing workers in that era of France.
>His ideas on class always peeks through
Do they? I think this is more his knowing who his audience was and why we have people like the mine manager in Germinal who would give anything for the miner's life but is crushed by responsibility and thinks the miners are free of.