An absolutely amazing piece of work, one which did not disappoint. Zola’s thirteenth Rougon-Macquart novel is about a miner’s strike in a bleak area of northern France in the 1860s (though much of the action is based on things that happened in the ’80s, closer to the time of its writing). Étienne Lantier, our protagonist and one of the strike leaders, is an itinerant worker whose genuine desire to help uplift and claim justice for the people he works among is cross-cut with a tendency towards self-aggrandisement and an unfortunate (Zola implies hereditary) bent for uncontrollable violence when drunk. But his is not the only perspective. We also hear from characters like fifteen-year-old miner’s daughter (and miner herself) Catherine, with whom Étienne falls in love, and even Monsier Hennebeau, the sexually frustrated owner of the primary pit, whose tortured marriage is a source of great emotional pain—he may be a filthy bourgeois (and he is pretty bad) but he is also human, and we are encouraged to see him as such.

Germinal has become quite famous for its sexual frankness and its violence. Sometimes these two things are intertwined: in a notorious scene, the furious women of the community descend on the arrogant and predatory shopkeeper Maigrat, who regularly refuses them single loaves of bread unless they agree to sex with him (or, in some cases, to send him their daughters for the same purpose). When, in his flight, he falls and hits his head, the oldest crone in the village tears off his genitals with her bare hands, and the women bear them aloft on a stick as they march. The translation stops it from being too graphic, but it’s all still very clear. Sexual violence and coercion is common; girls are often pregnant by sixteen if not before. I found the child Jeanlin the most frightening—a classic budding psychopath, he bullies and intimidates even his closest compatriots, steals, tortures animals, hoards food while the rest of his village starves, and eventually commits a murder, apparently out of curiosity. He’s about eleven. And yet Zola is also very good at charting the movement of love in this bleak world, which mostly takes the form of food: a mother makes soup last for days; workers trapped underground share bites of their belts and planks of wood. I am short-changing Germinal here, but the other option would be to write too much, and I don’t have the time. It is full of extraordinary scenes, powerful images that seared themselves onto my brain. Collier’s able translation captures the slanginess and earthiness of the mining community’s language without feeling anachronistic or try-hard, which surely helps. I’d love to know everyone else’s favourite Zola (I’ve read Nana, but nothing else). Source: local public library #LoveYourLibrary