Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers with intermediate to advanced French who want to take on a full-length original novel
- Literature lovers interested in naturalism and Zola's series novels
- Readers studying nineteenth-century French finance, cities, and class
- University students who want to use the French original for intensive reading practice
Not a good fit for
- Beginners in French, for whom the long sentences and financial vocabulary of the original pose considerable obstacles
- Readers who want only light stories and have no interest in speculation and capital
- Readers expecting a Chinese translation or annotated edition and needing supplementary reading materials
Reading tips
- First get a sense of the Les Rougon-Macquart series and the Second Empire background before entering the text.
- Prepare a character chart and note as you read the positions of the figures connected with the banks and the stock exchange.
- Read the financial and trading passages slowly and closely; for the rest of the narrative, read through first to grasp the main thread.
- Use a French dictionary and historical background materials, reading in sections and taking notes.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book in Chinese or French?
Do I need to read other works by Zola first?
Is the financial content in the book hard to understand?
Comments
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About the author
Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist, critic and political activist, one of the most prominent French writers of the late nineteenth century and the founder of the theory of naturalism. Through his twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart he constructed a vast social panorama, with representative works including Germinal, L'Assommoir, Au Bonheur des Dames and La Bête humaine. These works often take workers, peasants and ordinary city people as their protagonists, presenting poverty, labour and desire with meticulous observation and an almost documentary style, calm yet powerful. During the Dreyfus Affair Zola published the famous open letter J'Accuse, intervening in public affairs as an intellectual in the cause of justice. The library holds 93 of his works, including several translations.
