Pot-Bouille cover

Pot-Bouille

Rating 4.3
Word count
830K words
Chapters
83

Tags

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Pot-Bouille by Émile ZolaAuthor: Zola, Émile, 1840-1902,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Sep 1, 2005

Editor's review

Pot-Bouille is a sharp novel of social manners in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series. Set in a Parisian apartment building, it peels away layer after layer of bourgeois domestic respectability to reveal calculation, desire and hypocrisy. Zola's naturalist method is fully on display: everyday detail and dialogue build a dense social observation that is both coldly satirical and a truthful record of city life. This edition is a public-domain French e-book from Project Gutenberg, retaining the original language, and is suitable for practising French reading or studying the nineteenth-century French novel. Readers need not rush to judge the characters; first see how the building's spaces and class relations shape their choices.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • Lovers of French literature, especially naturalist fiction
  • French majors who wish to extend their reading with original French texts
  • Researchers of nineteenth-century European social history interested in urban family life
  • Book club members willing to discuss marriage, class and hypocrisy

Not a good fit for

  • Ordinary readers with no French who want a Chinese translation
  • Light readers who prefer fast plots and virtuous characters
  • Readers impatient with dense naturalist description

Reading tips

  1. Map the residents and their floors before entering the plot
  2. After each chapter, summarise in one sentence the core conflict of that household
  3. French readers can mark recurring words for family, money and respectability
  4. Read alongside other works in the Zola series to understand the continuity of characters and era

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83

FAQ

Is this book the original French edition?
Yes. This edition from Project Gutenberg is in French and is a public-domain e-book. It suits readers with some French reading ability and can serve as a text for studying Zola's original; if you only want the story, it is better to find a Chinese translation for comparison.
Can I read this without having read other Zola works?
Yes, it can be read independently. The book has a complete plot and cast of characters of its own and does not depend on earlier works. But it belongs to Les Rougon-Macquart, and knowing the series' overall design makes it easier to see the author's critique of Second Empire society.
Is this book suitable as French learning material?
Yes, but it is better suited to intermediate learners and above. Zola's sentences are long and his description dense, and nineteenth-century usage is distant from contemporary French. It is more effective to read a Chinese translation first for the plot, then return to selected passages in French for close reading.

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About the author

Émile Zola Author · French · 1840–1902

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.

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