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Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature. Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L'Assomoir (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, Nana (1880), dealing with prostitution, and Germinal (1885). Translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmee
The heroine of Zola's favourite novel is Mother Earth herself and the book is the famous 'living poem of the Earth' he wished to write. In an inversion of the King Lear plot, Fauan, an old peasant, divides his land between his three children, stipulating they must all pay him a pension. Hounded out by his children, suffering the extremities of the elements, he is eventually murdered by his son and daughter-in-law. But Fauan is no Lear and this is not a tragedy. The characters are of the land; their existence is a necessary bondage to the Earth, where everything is as it ought to be; the cycle of the seasons and their agricultural counterpart are in harmony, whatever human misfortunes are played out upon the surface. (Kirkus UK)
