Theme: Paris

L'Assommoir by Emile Zola is the kind of novel that leaves an indelible mark upon your emotional memory. The reader finishes the book and is left with a hopelessness, an extreme melancholy and perhaps even nostalgia, for the characters and their fate. Although I am not breaking new ground by highlighting Zola, L'Assommoir is many times overshadowed by Germinal or Nana but deserves more attention for its plot and stylistic naturalism. Also, it is the first major French novel that focuses solely on a working woman, Gervaise, which should be enough for the feminists out there.

And there is such ingenuity in this novel, you won't be aware of it at first. You won't notice the symmetry of the novel while you're reading it; it sneaks up after you read it a second or third time. For example, there is a pivotal birthday celebration, preceded by exactly six chapters before and followed by six more chapters. There are the events in her life that parallel the seasons - bad events in winter, more promising events in summer. Her limp worsens as her troubles become more harrowing. As the novel progresses, the theme of oppression begins with poverty but then it seeps from elements of Gervaise's life. Even from the onset of the novel, we know we're dealing with poverty and alcoholism. Yet, Gervaise seems hopeful that she will escape form poverty and that she nor her husband, Coupeau, will not fall prey to the evils of drink. We see a young couple in love while they share a sweet liqueur at the bar that later becomes the bane of their existence, L'Assommoir:

Now, at this stage of the lunch hour, The Assommoir was empty. Pere Colombe, a stout man of forty wearing a sleeved waistcoat, was serving a ten-year old girl who'd asked for four sous' worth of spirits in a cup. Sunshine flooded in through the door, warming the wooden floor which was permanently wet with the spit of smokers. And from the counter, from the casks, from the entire room, a smell of spirits rose up, an alcoholic capour which seemed to make even the dust-motes spinning about in the sunlight dense and drunken.

A ten-year old? But this is the what Zola paints for us as working-class scenery. Never mind that Coupeau and Gervaise are not drunk or yet drunkards, but the nonchalance of a child already in the process of a daily nip(or perhaps fetching it for someone else) tells the reality of Zola's poor during the Second Empire. Things go well for Gervaise for a time. Gervaise believes that as long as you work hard, the rewards will come. And, man, does she work hard. The woman does not take a day off. She has two children from a prior relationship and then has a third with Coupeau, Nana, who becomes the star of a later novel. With all this, she manages to open her own laundry in a tenement building. Woohoo. As her success grows as a laundress, she hires workers and is able to spruce up the place(also where she and her family live). She can even take a few moments to enjoy her earnings with some fine food and a nice dinner once and a while. This leads to a major event in the novel where we see the gluttony of Gervaise's greed and the prevailing attitude of the poor towards the Throne.

And as for the wine, well, friends, the wine flowed round that table like water down the Seine, or like a stream when it's been raining and the ground is parched. When Coupeau poured the raised bottle high, to see the red jet foam in the glass; and when a bottle was empty, he made a joke of up-ending and squeezing its neck with his fingers the way women do when they milk a cow. Another litre-d turned its toes up! In a corner of the shop, the pile of dead men was growing bigger, making a cemetery of bottles where they dumped the rubbish from the tablecloth. When Madame Putois asked for water, the roofer indignantly took all the carafes from the table. Since when did decent folk drink water? Did she fancy a few frogs in the stomach, then? Glasses were being emptied in one go; you could hear the liquid flowing straight down people's throats, sounding like rainwater pouring down drainpipes on a stormy day. You could say, couldn't you, that it was raining wine, wine which at first tasted of old casks, but you'd no trouble at all getting used to it, so that soon it seemed quite nutty. Oh, what the hell, the Jesuits could say what they liked, the juice of the vine was a bloody good invention! The company laughed in approval; after all, a workman couldn't get along without wine and the old man Noah must have planted the cine specially for roofers, tailors, and blacksmiths. Wine cleaned you up and refreshed you after work, and put fire in your guts when you didn't feel like doing anything; and when that jester played his little tricks on you, well, then you thought you were one hell of a feller, and Paris belonged to you. What's more a worker who was worn out and stony broke, treated like scum bu the rich, had a fat lot to cheer about, so it was a bit much, wasn't it, to grumble if he went on the booze now and again, just to make life seem a bit rosier! Right now, fr'instance, wasn't it true they didn't give a damn about the Emperor? Very likely the Emperor was pissed as well, but who cared, they didn't give a damn about him, they dared him to be more pissed than them or be having more of a blast. To hell with the nobs! If Coupeau had his way, everyone could go to hell. Still, not the ladies - the ladies were sweeties, and he tapped his pocket, jingling his three sous and laughing as if he were shovelling a pile of five-franc pieces.

It's frustrating watching people fall into alcoholism during the course of the story, but it's even more exasperating that Gervaise withstands the men in her life to drink away her earnings. Her family and friends are unappreciative and and cruel, undermining her successes and lavishing in her failures. And as it turns out, she becomes bitter and resentful. But instead of fighting back everything around becomes so oppressive that it's no wonder she turns to the thing she hates the most, the one thing that has destroyed her life - liquor, or as Zola tenderly calls it, rotgut. Finally, the weight of the novel ways on the reader as we get the demise that we have been set up for:

The anisette made her fell queasy, and she'd have liked some neat spirits to settle her insides. And she kept casting sidelong glances at the boozing machine behind her. That bloody great pot, as round as the belly of a fat tinker's wife, with its thrusting, twisting snout, sent shivers down her back, shivers of fear mixed with longing. Yes, it was like the metallic innards of some gigantic whore, of some sorceress who was distilling, drop by drop, the fire that burned in her gut. A pretty source of poison, an operation so shameless, so foul, it should have been buried away deep down inside a cellar! But in spite of what she felt, Gervaise would have liked to get her nose right in it, to sniff the smell and taste the filthy stuff, even if it burned her tongue and made it peel like an orange.

Of course, we know that life doesn't not end well for Gervaise. Zola masterminds a labyrinthine plot of epic proportions. We are led through her life, the life of a poverty-stricken woman, with such deftness that we feel every nuance of her hopes and losses. Zola did us a favor but making Gervaise the centerpiece of this working-class saga. It all becomes more visceral and heartrending. If you are going to discover Zola, or read more, read L'Assommoir for the beauty of its grit.

L'Assommoir
By Emile Zola
Translated by Margaret Mauldon(excellent translation, by the way)
Oxford University Press
Paperback
528 Pages
ISBN: 9780192838131
$12.95