L’œuvre (1886)
Emile Zola has become one of my favorite writers in all of literature. He is most known for ushering naturalism which is detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had an inescapable force in shaping human character. Coming from Baltimore (lol) this concept is very real to me and is something I to an extent do believe in. He put his life’s work into his Les Rougon-Macquart series,a series of 20 books undertaken in 1871 and completed 1893. The series was about a single family under the French Second Empire (1852-1870), under Napoleon III. In an historical perspective there was much significance pertaining to this period. Hussmann completely reconstructed Paris in an urban renewal program that left a debt that wasn’t paid till after WWI, the art of impressionism came about being first featured in Salon des Refuses, and it all concluded with the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. The idea of the series was to show a single family, one legitimate and one not, over a span of 5 generations, as they react to their environment under the second empire. Each book centers on a single family member and examines a social issue at the time. No conclusions were drawn, no morale at the end, just in short naturalism. In this series everything from prostitution, alcoholism, politics, religion, art, and murder to coal mining, train driving, farming, and fashion retail were covered.
Personally completing all of his 20 books was one of the most amazing experiences in all of literature that I have ever had. Going from book to book seeing the characters as they progress was just a lot of fun! Currently I am going through all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but even it still doesn’t compare to this series as a cohesive unit. I think the only thing that could possibly top this is Marcel Proust’s In search of Lost Time series which I plan to read soon.
My favorite book out the Zola series was The Masterpiece L’œuvre. This was the 14th book in the series exploring the beginnings of Impressionism. Zola, personally, had an intimate experience with this as his roommate was the famous impressionist Paul Cezanne and was great friends with Edouard Manet who did the famous portrait of Zola himself. Sadly, this book, because of its highly autobiographical nature, was incidentally responsible for ending Zola and Cezanne’s friendship.
The story follows the character Claude Lantier whose mother was the main character of perhaps the most critically acclaimed book of the series L’Assommoir, 8th in the series. It was a novel that examined alcoholism of the working class and was the first book in the series to really launch Zola and get him the attention of the masses. The character from this story had 3 sons and one daughter and each of her children’s novels proved to be among the most powerful of Les Rougon-Macquart series: Nana, Le Bete Humaine, and Germinal. However it was The masterpiece that stood out as my favorite.
The story was about an obsessive and highly ambitious young painter as he struggled to get his revolutionary art style recognized. The parallels between this charcter and the real life sruggle for the first impressionists to breakthrough were amazing. Edouard Manet’s Luncheon at the Park became the model work for Claude Lantier as we in depth understand the true courage of these artists to break through to get their works known.
The overall theme of this novel existentially questions rather as an individual should one devote all of their time and energy to leaving a mark in some way or should one spend more time with one’s family and live for the present. We see the novel’s protagonist wade between being a husband and father, and his life’s work, his art…
