A review by d_audy
L'Œuvre by Émile Zola

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

One of Zola's masterpieces about art, the woes and doubts surrounding creation and about the Rougon-Macquart cycle itself -, a kind of dialogue with himself, his more confident, idealistic side projected into the successful writer Sandoz, and his darker, pessimistic self, riddled by doubts about the value of his own work, terrified that the various pieces of his garden work don't fit together or that he doesn't have the talent to bring to life the grand tapestry of reality personified by the failing painter Claude Lantier.    For a long time this was interpreted as a portrait of Zola and his friend Cézanne based on an hypothesis that the novel was the cause of their falling out, though recent scholarship and a found letter have destroyed that thesis, making the scholars return to Zola's own notes that the two characters are sides of himself.   The novel also features brilliant images of Zola's own doubts that progress and enlightened modernity he hoped would bring happiness to humanity might instead first throw it back into horrific darkness, a presage of the ill turn the early 20th century would turn.