One of the books that I
inherited from my grandparents, and one which my grandad had loved dearly (that
is, before he started mashing all his 19th century greats together
and think of how badly Raskolnikov had behaved with the Karamazov brothers, but
luckily Valjean had managed to sort everything out).
130 years after its
publication, the prose of Germinal is
not really cutting-edge (but was that ever the case for a feuilleton?), yet the
content remains extremely poignant and, sadly, current (the story of the 33
Chilean miners hasn’t been completely forgotten, at least not by me). There is
no need to point out how deep the book is, or how one cannot really understand
the rise of the left in Europe without reading works like this – what struck me
the most, however, was the wonderfully touching depiction of the daily lives of
the French miners (I believe Beppe Fenoglio and Nuto Revelli would then follow
in Zola’s footsteps when they looked at the Piedmontese poor in the 20th
century).
And the fact that, in my version
of the book, all the names were Italianized was so very sweetly old-school…
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