Scan barcode
A review by eddiecational
Germinal by Émile Zola
3.0
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.
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.