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jasonfurman 's review for:
The Drinking Den
by Émile Zola
I used to think that Bernard Malamud's The Fixer was the most relentlessly bleak and depressing book because it went from bad to worse to much worse over the course of the novel. But L'Assommoir (translated here as The Drinking Den) beats it because it has short interludes of slightly better that make the overall trend that much more painful. It is a little didactic and mono-thematic (drinking is bad for poor people, really really bad), but it centers around one extraordinary character (Gervaise Coupeau), has smaller parts for two extraordinary girls (her daughter Nana who becomes a prostitute at age 15 and her next door neighbor Lalie, who watches her mother get beaten to death by her alcoholic father and eventually succumbs to the same fate herself), and has some amazing set-pieces, including a trip to the Louvre by Gervaise's wedding party and what must be one of the most memorably described dinner parties in literature.
L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.
L'Assommoir does not have anything resembling the range of Dickens, the depth of Hugo or Tolstoy, or the peripatetic energy of Balzac. But it does hit its theme effectively and relentlessly to create something that must have been an eye-opening read at the time and still feels revelatory.