Le Docteur Pascal
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers with some French reading ability who want to read Zola in the original.
- Readers who have read several volumes of Les Rougon-Macquart and want to complete the series.
- Researchers interested in scientific discourse and ideas of heredity in nineteenth-century literature.
- Literature students accustomed to close reading with public-domain French e-books.
Not a good fit for
- Beginners with little French who need a translation alongside to make progress.
- Ordinary readers who want a single novel and no series background.
- Readers expecting fast-moving plots and impatient with long disquisitions and archival narration.
Reading tips
- Review the fates of the series' main characters before reading this book for a clearer view of its closing and echoings.
- Mark the passages on heredity and medicine separately, and after finishing sort out the author's scientific ideas.
- If the French is hard going, read a chapter précis before returning to the original, so vocabulary problems don't derail the whole reading.
- After finishing, draw up a short table of relationships among the series' characters to test your grasp of the book's summing-up intent.
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 the French original, and how difficult is it?
Why is this called the series' closing work?
Do the medical views in the book still hold today?
Does the public-domain e-book have notes and an introduction?
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.
