Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by franklekens
L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
5.0
A masterpiece!
A word of warning about translations again: do not try the older translations available for free on the internet, they will be bowdlerized, which is particularly damaging in the case of a work like this, the artistic success of which resides partly in the extent to which it scandalized contemporary sensibilities with its portrayal of lower class life. Shock effect was not the goal, but it it was a means in this novel, and if you erase that, you erase a lot of its power.
I ended up reading the old Penguin translation by Leonard Tancock, which after comparing a few chapters and further random passages I found I preferred to the two other currently available English translations, the new Penguin translation by Robin Buss and the OUP World's Classics translation by Margaret Mauldon, and certainly to the two Dutch translations I briefly looked into.
As soon as I can find the time I will try to give some more detailed impressions of the differences between these translations on my blog and provide a link here. (Busse's and Mauldon's are certainly not bad, and their editions offer more by way of background information in the form of introductions, translator's prefaces and footnotes, so I'd strongly recommend any reader interested in the novel to hunt up at least two different editions of the novel and maybe read them in alternating order; or just read the book twice, it is worth it.)
A word of warning about translations again: do not try the older translations available for free on the internet, they will be bowdlerized, which is particularly damaging in the case of a work like this, the artistic success of which resides partly in the extent to which it scandalized contemporary sensibilities with its portrayal of lower class life. Shock effect was not the goal, but it it was a means in this novel, and if you erase that, you erase a lot of its power.
I ended up reading the old Penguin translation by Leonard Tancock, which after comparing a few chapters and further random passages I found I preferred to the two other currently available English translations, the new Penguin translation by Robin Buss and the OUP World's Classics translation by Margaret Mauldon, and certainly to the two Dutch translations I briefly looked into.
As soon as I can find the time I will try to give some more detailed impressions of the differences between these translations on my blog and provide a link here. (Busse's and Mauldon's are certainly not bad, and their editions offer more by way of background information in the form of introductions, translator's prefaces and footnotes, so I'd strongly recommend any reader interested in the novel to hunt up at least two different editions of the novel and maybe read them in alternating order; or just read the book twice, it is worth it.)