A little bit more about The Fortune of the Rougons

So much is going on in 'The Fortune of the Rougons' that it needs at least a couple of posts, significant portions of the book are spent in explaining the origins of the Rougon-Macquart family which tends towards
the gossipy and scandalous, they're not a very likeable bunch but that makes for fun reading.

The rest of the book, the bit that deals with that one December week in 1851 is different. It starts and ends in what's left of a graveyard, a place where the earth has been gorged with corpses until it will hold no more, over time it's been abandoned, the bones dug up and carried away in a tumbril, and the whole lot turned into a sort of common ground for gypsies and a wood yard. It was on the first page with that description of a corpse gorged patch of land covered in a monstrous growth of weeds and pear trees that no housewife will have the fruit from that I fell in love with the book. I like a good strong visual image to hold onto and between them Zola and Nelson excel at providing them, for me there's a distinctly Pre Raphaelite feel to these scenes (they bring to mind Millais 'Ophelia' or something like Arthur Hughes 'April Love'). Silvere and Miette have been meeting in a corner of the wood yard by an old grave - it's a clear precursor of their fate.

They are 17 and 13 respectively and innocently in love, the emphasis is very much on their innocence, for two years they've talked and kissed on the cheek, Silvere has been the one bright spot in Miette's otherwise pretty grim existence, in turn his feelings for her are distinctly chivalrous. Her father is a convicted murderer and Plassans is happy to visit the sins of the father on the child. Silvere dreams of winning respect for Miette and is deeply disturbed by any hint of sexuality creeping into their relationship. His other great love is for the Republic, that too is a pure love and one that provides a stark contrast to his uncle Rougons support for the Bonapartist cause or his uncle Macquart's brand of republicanism.

Silvere and Miette's relationship is almost all conducted in open countryside - as enclosed as it gets is between the wood stacks and the wall of the old graveyard, and again this is a contrast to the Rougon Macquart scheming which takes place mostly behind closed doors. The descriptions of the Provençal countryside are wonderfully evocative and again had me searching for paintings to match them (I tried looking for French ones, but for now everything is going through a Pre-Raphaelite filter) and curiously I found myself paying more attention than I might normally have done to these bits because of a background awareness of Nelson's translation.

Silvere's two loves become one when Miette dons a red cape and takes up the red flag of the republic (which finally put me in mind of Delacroix and just a little of David's 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps) but again all this red isn't a great omen for the future. Eventually Miette ends up dead in Silvere's arms wrapped in her cape and flag having just become aware of what their dreams have cost them in the way of love and life. It could be tedious - there's a lot of symbolism and regretted virginity, but it's not, instead it's beautiful and heartbreaking as is Silvere's eventual death.

I have no idea what the rest of the cycle holds for me, and don't even know much about what Zola was trying to do with his writing yet - I've a lot of reading to do around these books as well as of them to really appreciate what's going on, but as an introduction this has been such an inspiring read.

The Fortune of the Rougons - Emile Zola

My Zola project has begun and enthusiasm levels are high. The edition I read was the Oxford World's Classics translation by Brian Nelson and it's excellent. I still find the whole concept of translated fiction a little bit troublesome, certainly to the extent that it stayed on my mind, but not enough to be a real distraction although there were moments when I found myself wondering why Nelson had chosen a particular word - kids instead of children is a specific example. A couple of minutes research show that 'kid' was in common usage in this sense by the 1840's in English at any rate, I had thought it would have been later which is why it stood out from the text for me, it also made the scene it appeared in more shocking, a little jolt that shook me out of my reading rhythm long enough to be just slightly uncomfortable and to heighten awareness of what was going on in the plot - which I think explains why he made that choice.

My fascination with the process of translation comes from my complete dependence on the translator to have any sort of access to the story, my language skills can just about get me through a wine label in French but not much further. It's a love of history, and more specifically the history of art, which initially prodded me in the direction of nineteenth century literature, the books and paintings taken together give each other an extra depth and context. Because of my lack of skill with languages my studies veered towards British art and classics of English literature, otherwise I might have started reading Zola 20 odd years ago when I first found him on a recommended reading list (I love the way books will wait until your ready for them).

The only time I've ever been to France we only got as far as Paris, this was about when as I should first have been reading Zola, the overwhelming impression was how much the bits of the country I saw from the back of a car looked like England, and Paris itself felt Parisian rather than French in the same way that I never think of London as particularly English. The France that Zola shows us in 'The Fortune of the Rougons' is distinctly foreign to me, set as it is far further south than I've ever been and that in itself was unexpectedly exciting. It's also distinctly different to anything else I've read from the time, though a very helpful girl in Waterstones suggested that I might want to read some Gissing alongside the pile of Zola's I bought from her which seems like a good idea.

A lot happens in 'The Fortune of the Rougons' in the space of a week, and a lot more family history is covered at the same time which made it occasionally confusing (this edition comes with a handy family tree which I regularly referred to) but also very fast paced and very effective as a teaser for the rest of the series. The setting is the fictional Provencal town of Plassans, a sleepy but reasonably prosperous town which is home to Adelaide Fouque. She is the daughter of a prosperous market gardener and the unfortunate possessor of a nervous condition which may or may not be insanity. When her father dies she marries the hired help - a peasant named Rougon, it's a union that scandalises the town and leaves her with a son before Rougon himself also dies at which point she starts and affair with a smuggler by the name of Macquart with whom she has two illegitimate children which further scandalises the town. When Pierre Rougon grows up he promptly swindles his mother and two siblings out of her family money and marries an ambitious woman named Felicite. 'The Fortune of the Rougons' deals mostly with Adelaide and Felicite's children and the various traits they've inherited from their parents. Basically low peasant cunning, a disposition towards alcoholism and nervous disorders, and greed.

The best of the lot is the idealistic young Silvere and his love Miette, Silvere is a committed republican - his fervour for the cause borders on obsession, but he's also a kind and gentle young man. He and Miette head off with a republican uprising full of hope for the future - it ends in a way that's both cruel and beautiful. Meanwhile after 30 years of disappointment Silvere's uncle Pierre Rougon (by now in his 60's) has been positioning himself to take advantage of the Bonapartist coup (it's 1851) which after various unsavoury machinations he manages to do and that leaves everything set up for the rest of the cycle.

I have about nine volumes now so my next decision is what to read next. The second book in the series seems hard to get hold of unless as part of an ebook bundle that has all 20 parts in it and that I doubt I would actually read particularly soon. The scene setting done in this volume makes me feel like I could pretty much jump in anywhere, even more so because it seems so many of these books work as stand alone novels as well so it seems likely that I'll settle on whichever title calls the loudest to be read next.

Found in translation

Last October I was playing with the idea of reading my way through Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels as a long term project. Never one to rush into a thing when I can put it off for a bit it's taken me until this week to actually open a book but I've finally started on 'The Fortune of the Rougons' and it's giving me a lot to think about.

I once read something somewhere about the British being pretty poor at reading European classics which presumably extends to fiction in translation generally. If I'm in any way typical it's an accurate assessment and I'm guessing I am reasonably typical in this because bar the inevitable Scandi thrillers my local bookshops have very little foreign fiction (would that be the correct term?) on offer. I'm not really sure if it's something I should feel mildly guilty about or not, great books deserve to be read, but there are far to many to ever read all of them so does it matter which ones you read as long as you enjoy them? I don't think it does matter but still feel mildly guilty about it and that's the reason for this Zola odyssey - I get to combine a general enthusiasm for nineteenth century classics and expand my horizons (very slightly).

Not reading a great deal in translation coupled with no ability to learn other languages at all also means I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what translation means. Until I read about it somewhere it had never occurred to me that translation would be anything other than literal but then I'd never thought about it, now I have it's obvious that there would be a creative, interpretive element to it. When I first thought about this project Tom at Wuthering Expectations pointed me to this blog here for somebody who'd already done it and had some interesting things to say about old Zola translations - the Vizetelly versions are available free as ebooks and in some cases are (I believe) all that is available. The version I'm reading is a new translation for Oxford World's Classics by Brian Nelson which I'm really enjoying, it's vivid, evocative, and generally compelling. I've also had a look at the Vizetelly version - just the first few pages to compare a sequence I particularly liked in the OWC book. The differences aren't as startling as the passages Guy picked out (follow that link) in this case different words don't really change the meaning of a descriptive passage of a disused graveyard but Nelson paints me a more satisfying picture.

The result is that this is the first time I genuinely wish I could understand French but then books are so often the way into things for me. I wonder if I'd been familiar with some French classic suitable for 11 year olds and told it was even better in the original if that would have made me try that little bit harder with the language. As it was Asterix was pretty good in English and all I can do is read Zola's story rather than his words which possibly explains why as a nation we're reasonably indifferent to translated fiction but does nothing to explain why we're not better at teaching languages.

A Project?

I'm not generally very good at reading projects and challenges but sometimes it feels like a good idea and I've got one brewing. I enjoyed making my way through Trollope's Barchester chronicles in conjunction with Mrs Oliphant's Carlingford chronicles and am still enjoying the Palliser books (half way through; it might be time for volume 4 soon, reading them in order and with the intention of working my way through the lot has definitely encouraged me to tackle books that might have looked off puttingly chunky otherwise (and which in fairness wouldn't have worked as well independently). I've also found it helpful to have no particular time scale in mind - I'm not sure it's a good idea to rip through a series of books in a matter of weeks or months which were years in the writing (to much of a good thing isn't always a good thing) also it doesn't feel helpful to pile pressure on to an activity that's meant to be fun.

The project I have in mind is to tackle Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, it seems like a good idea for a few reasons. I've never read much literature in translation; something that bothers me more when I think about the classics than about contemporary fiction (which I don't read a lot of anyway so I don't feel that I'm being particularly prejudiced there) and Zola is probably as good a place to start as anywhere in a quest to broaden that particular horizon. He's also a writer who I see referenced enough to make me feel particularly ignorant for not being better acquainted with him and one whose work should be cheap if not free on Kindle when nice paperbacks prove hard to find. Also I already have a copy of 'The Fortune of the Rougons' to get started with and it's undeniably the time of year to line up something Victorian and classic so really there's nothing holding me back.. Watch this space.