Wow, the body count really pile up there at the end. Zola even killed the horse!

I read this book as part of my long-running attempt to finish the BBC’s ‘100 books you must read before you die’ list, which I just found out doesn’t actually exist and was in fact most likely made up by someone on Facebook who added Germinal themselves. So, that’s great!

Germinal is the story of a mining community pushed to its limits by capitalist exploitation in 1860s France. It follows Étienne Lantier, a starving migrant worker who stumbles upon the coal mining town of Montsou, where he reluctantly settles in to make a living with the family of a fellow miner, Maheu. Over the course of the novel, tensions build as Étienne grows to adopt socialist principles, and reach a number of explosive points of revolt, sabotage and death.

I found the early trip into the Voreux (the coal mine) incredibly claustrophobic at times as well as almost monstrous in its description of a shaft that “swallowed men by mouthfuls of twenty or thirty, and with so easy a gulp that it seemed to feel nothing go down” with a signal cord “ringing meat," to give warning of this burden of human flesh.” Zola gives a really strong impression of the horror story that was everyday life working in these dangerous and toxic environments for ever decreasing wages, something he complemented well with the gentile lives of M. Grégoire of the Company and his family.

The depictions of the violent brutality of the miners when the uprising inevitably happens felt excessive at times, and certain characters such as Catherine get fairly short shrift in the narrative and are arguably underdeveloped. I enjoyed the contrasts between Étienne and Rasseneur, the older and somewhat wearier former miner. Overall, I can’t say I necessarily had much fun reading Germinal, but it’s an important story about the awful conditions of those on the front line of exploitative societies and the value of class-based solidarity and resistance in bringing about necessary but costly change.

And let's be real, you absolutely can't knock an ending like this:

“Again and again, more and more distinctly, as though they were approaching the soil, the mates were hammering. In the fiery rays of the sun on this youthful morning the country seemed full of that sound. Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth.”

Chills, lads, chills.

قبل از خوندن ژرمینال، فکر میکردم با کتابی طرف باشم که قرار نیست زیاد جذاب باشه. ناتورالیسم، ادبیات قرن نوزده، مفاهیم سوسیالیستی و... از خصوصیاتی بودن که خیال میکردم به خاطرشون کتاب خسته‌کننده و شعاری بشه و صرفا به خاطر اهمیت تاریخی و تاثیرگذاریش بود که فکر میکردم باید حتما ژرمینال رو خوند.
اما کاملا اشتباه تصور کردم. کتابی که زولا نوشته یکی از جذاب‌ترین تجربه‌های ادبی اخیر من بوده. شاید از نظر محتوا و عقیدتی نشه با همه صفحات کتاب کنار اومد، اما از نظر روایی به جز تحسین چیزی برای گفتن در مورد ژرمینال ندارم. شخصیت‌پردازی‌ها، ساختار داستان و توصیفات زولا فوق‌العاده خوندنی بودن. تا انتها کتاب جذابیتش رو از دست نمیده و حتی شاید فصل به فصل بهتر هم بشه.
ژرمینال برای من اولین کتاب ناتورالیستی میشه که از خوندنش واقعا لذت بردم. و فکر می‌کنم مهمترین دلیلش هم هماهنگی بین موضوع/محتوا و فرم رمان بود. فکر می‌کنم هیچ سبکی به جز این میتونست به این زیبایی داستان این کارگران معدن رو به تصویر بکشه.

REALLY close to 5 stars. One of those books I'll be reflecting on for a long while, and I might adjust my rating accordingly. Intense, still relevant, harrowing, atmospheric.

Germinal follows the participants of a coal miners strike in northern france and puts a lot of emphasis on the social lives of the townspeople, proletarian or otherwise. it's realistically very bleak and deals with gender politics a lot more than I expected it too. sometimes dragging a bit but the big moments are violent and stick with you, especially since Zola pulled a lot of it from his research trips to mining towns. it's also hilarious that it's like the 13th entry in a long running naturalist middle class soap opera series with reoccurring characters but that kinda adds to it.

Its enthralling, the first and last 100 pages are difficult to put down. The novel follows the lives of the miners in detail, yet it is never a tedious read. The descriptions of the mine are matter of fact and horrific. The villages are rife with promiscuity, in the fields, in abandoned buildings, behind the slag heaps. Worked like beasts of burden in the mines, on the surface the only thing to do is take the only pleasure that is free.

At different points in the story we see the perspective of the surrounding bourgeois, a pit manger, small shareholders, and the like. The juxtaposition between their lives and those of the miners makes clear how vapid their sympathy is and how frivolous their charity. Their plenty only evokes disgust. But they are not villains, just cogs in the machine of capital. The politics are much more sophisticated than the 'if only (good) masters and workers talked' policy of [b:North and South|156538|North and South|Elizabeth Gaskell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1699604581l/156538._SY75_.jpg|1016482]