The Kill by Émile Zola (Book Analysis)


Book Description

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Kill with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Kill by Émile Zola, a daring novel about the excesses and follies of the upper classes of Parisian society during the mid-19th century. It follows the lives of Aristide Saccard, a property speculator who takes great delight in swindling everyone he meets, and his wife Renée, whose loneliness and boredom lead her to embark on an affair with her own stepson, setting in motion a series of events that eventually lead to disaster. The Kill is the fourteenth instalment of Les Rougon-Macquart, an ambitious cycle of 20 novels which tells the story of one extended family under the Second French Empire. Émile Zola was the leading figure of the literary school of naturalism, as well as an influential social thinker, and is now regarded as one of France’s greatest novelists. Find out everything you need to know about The Kill in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!




The Kill


Book Description

'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 city had become an orgy of gold and women.' The Kill (La Curée) 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 property speculator, Saccard, his neurotic wife Renée, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.




The Belly of Paris


Book Description

The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, first published in 1873. It is a novel of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The book was originally translated into English by Henry Vizetelly and published in 1888 under the title Fat and Thin. After Vizetelly's imprisonment for obscene libel the novel was one of those revised and expurgated by his son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart. She has become prosperous, and with prosperity her selfishness has increased. Her brother-in-law Florent had escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lived for a short time in her house, but she became tired of his presence and ultimately denounced him to the police. Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.




His Excellency


Book Description

His Excellency (French: Son Excellence Eugene Rougon) - From Zola's Rougon-Macquart Series. "Son Excellence Eugene Rougon is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire. It is a book for foreigners and particularly Englishmen to read with profit, for there are yet many among them who cherish the delusion that Napoléon III. was not only a good and true friend of England, but also a wise and beneficent ruler of France; and this, although his reign began with bloodshed and trickery, was prolonged by means of innume-rable subterfuges, and ended in woe, horror, and disgrace... There is, of course, some fiction in the book; but, again and again, page after page, I have found a simple record of fact, just deftly adapted to suit the requirements of the narrative. The history of the Second Empire is probably as familiar to me as it is to M. Zola himself-for, like him, I grew to manhood in its midst, with better opportunities, too, than he had of observing certain of its distinguishing features - and thus I have been able to identify innumerable incidents and allusions, and trace to their very source some of the most curious passages in the book. And it is for this reason, and by virtue of my own knowledge and experience, that I claim for His Excellency the merit of reflecting things as they really were in the earlier years of the Imperial régime." (Ernest Alfred Vizetelly)




Germinal


Book Description

Book Excerpt: ...n ill-greased pulley, and ended by degenerating into a terrible spasm of coughing. The fire basket now clearly lit up his large head, with its scanty white hair and flat, livid face, spotted with bluish patches. He was short, with an enormous neck, projecting calves and heels, and long arms, with massive hands falling to his knees. For the rest, like his horse, which stood immovable, without suffering from the wind, he seemed to be made of stone; he had no appearance of feeling either the cold or the gusts that whistled at his ears. When he coughed his throat was torn by a deep rasping; he spat at the foot of the basket and the earth was blackened.Étienne looked at him and at the ground which he had thus stained."Have you been working long at the mine?"Bonnemort flung open both arms."Long? I should think so. I was not eight when I went down into the Voreux and I am now fifty-eight. Reckon that up! I have been everything down there; at first trammer, then putter, when I h...




La Debacle


Book Description

La Debacle is the penultimate novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A stirring account of profound friendship between two soldiers from opposite ends of the class divide during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1.




Émile Zola


Book Description

Zola and the art of fiction -- Before the Rougon-Macquart -- The fat and the thin: The belly of Paris -- 'A work of truth': L'assommoir -- The man-eater: Nana --The dream machine: The ladies' paradise -- Down the mine: Germinal -- The great mother: Earth -- After the Rougon-Macquart.




La Bête humaine


Book Description

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his `most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.




Nana


Book Description

French realism's immortal siren crawled from the gutter to the heights of society, devouring men and squandering fortunes along the way. Zola's 1880s classic is among the first modern novels.




Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille)


Book Description

Zola's most acerbic social satire, Pot Luck is set in a newly constructed block of flats in the Rue de Choiseul, Paris. Although it seems a place of prosperity and harmony, it is riddled with snobbery and hypocrisy. Systematically exposing the contradictions that pervade bourgeois life, Zola reveals a multitude of adulteries and betrayals, and depicts a veritable `melting pot' of moral and sexual degeneracy. This new translation captures the directness and robustness of Zola's language, and restores the omissions of earlier abridged versions.