The Paradise (aka The Ladies Paradise) - Emile Zola

After reading and loving Germinal a few years ago, I decided that The Ladies Paradise would be the next novel by Emile Zola that I would read. I was told by other bloggers that it was excellent but very different from Germinal.

On the surface, these two books couldn't be more different--Germinal is set in a company mining town and involves the lives and struggles of the miners, and The Ladies Paradise is about a department store in Paris. Both set in the late 19th century.

However, I was constantly reminded of Germinal as I was reading The Ladies Paradise. Zola depicts both the mine in Germinal and the department store (which is called The Ladies Paradise) in Paris as monsters and machines, consuming the traditional way of life of the countryside and city, feeding on the energy of the workers, exploiting their dreams, and crushing their lives. A few survive and thrive, a few survive and limp along, but most are swept away by the inhuman ferocity of the machine.

The version I read was renamed The Paradise, and is a tie-in to the mini-series, which was set in England rather than France, and it shows on the cover the actress who plays Denise, the main character, a girl from a town in Normandy who comes to Paris with her two younger brothers after their parents die. She is hoping to work in her uncle's shop, which is across from The Ladies Paradise, but business is so bad that he cannot take her on. She finds a position in The Ladies Paradise, suffers much, perseveres, and earns her reward, although you can't help but wonder how happy she will be with that reward!

Denise's story is very much like that of Christian in A Pilgrim's Progress, constantly struggling and beset with trials and tribulations, temptations and false friends, but she stays true to her internal guiding spirit and prevails.

I also couldn't help thinking about the movie You've Got Mail while I read this book. Octave Mouret, the owner of The Ladies Paradise, and Joe Fox, owner of  Fox & Sons Books are definitely cut from the same cloth--they orchestrate the ruin of the little shops that constitute their main competition for customers and charmingly defend their ruthlessness by insisting that the demise of the little shops was inevitable and they are not to blame for the fate of others. I kept on waiting for M. Moret to insist that "it isn't personal."

I felt a certain amount of frustration with the little shop owners, who fought back by trying to beat Mouret at his own game instead of trying to figure out a new game for themselves...but then, maybe that was Zola's point. The small shop owners who had mostly inherited their businesses from their fathers and grandfathers weren't able to change. Progress was flattening them and they couldn't deal with the new reality--they didn't have the skills, the mindset, the energy, or the resources that the modern world demanded.

As we deal with our own constantly changing world in which no one really knows what the next big thing will be that will sweep through the market, The Paradise was a sobering book to read.

This is my Classic in Translation for the Back to the Classics Challenge, 2018, and my fourth classic this year. It's also part of my reading about France for my summer trip to Paris and Normandy. I've been reading a lot lately about the Impressionist painters and how they depict a Paris that was undergoing tremendous physical change, and so it was interesting to read a novel by a Parisian of their generation writing about the tearing down of buildings and age-old traditions as Paris transformed from a meandering medieval city to one of boulevards and lights.

Germinal by Émile Zola

I received a copy of Émile Zola's novel Germinal years ago as the result of a fellow blogger's giveaway that I won, and I finally read it this Fall.  It took me a little while because it is such a dense, somber story, and I needed to take breaks from time to time to cleanse my palate.  Fortunately, the book is divided into seven parts, so I read one roughly each week.  I ended up being totally blown away by the book, and enthusiastically gave it five Goodreads stars.

I read the Oxford World Classics version, translated from French by Peter Collier, with an introduction, which I just read tonight, by Robert Lethbridge.  I found the introduction to be such fun to read--a great way to help me sort through why I responded so warmly to such a bleak book.

And it is bleak.  The central character, Etienne Lantier, is a budding socialist who, desperate for work, arrives in a mining village in northern France in the mid-1880s, is hired on, falls in love with his landlord's daughter, and leads the starving, poverty-stricken miners and their families in a strike that ultimately fails and worsens the lot of the villagers.  He survives the collapse of a mine that he is working in and survives floods, explosions, and a murderous rival during the twelve days he is trapped underground.

The novel gets its name from one of the springtime months within the French Republican Calendar, and while the novel seems to end on a positive note, with the emergence of springtime after the long cold winter of massive discontent, I couldn't forget that spring and summer ripen and fade into fall and winter.

Despite the bleakness--and it is truly jaw-dropping to read about the horrific conditions under which these French miners existed--I found the book absolutely compelling and the energy contained within it electrifying.  I think Lethbridge, in his introduction, expressed what caught me as "the synthesis of the archetypal with the documentary."

Starting first with the documentary, Zola seamlessly wrote of the details of the lives of the mining families as well as their bourgeois mine managers in the context of the intricacies of mine machinery, operation, dynamics, geology, structure and the sights and smells and feelings of being underground. Before he wrote novels, Zola had been a journalist and even though Germinal is the 13th novel in a 20-volume series, he went back to his training as a journalist and thoroughly researched the mining industry in northern France before writing the book.

But detailed descriptions alone do not great literature make,  Zola also employed a rich and layered imagery, for example denoting the mine as a beast who must be fed humanity to survive.  And from that imagery, Zola was able to tap into our collective remembered stories, the archetypal stories that keep on reappearing down the ages, and that are referred to as myths.  Germinal has Demeter/Persephone/Hades, it has the prodigal son, it has Cain and Abel, and it has the maenads (female followers of Dionysus) to name a few, and probably many more that I didn't even recognize.

It's that "synthesis of the archetypal with the documentary" that makes Germinal work.  It is utterly believable--it feels like truth.

Final note--if you are moved to adding Germinal to your classics reading list, seek out the translation by Peter Collier.  It is absolutely riveting.  It sounds modern but at the same time completely realistic for 1880's French miners.  It is raw, graphic, often vulgar, and utterly unlike anything else I've read from this time period.  I find it surprising that this book wasn't banned for its frank depiction of sex, poverty, drunkenness, and debauchery--perhaps it was.  It is also poetic and lyrical.  It is as if Zola put his hand on the pulse of humanity and opened a vein.