L'Assomir tells the story of Gervaise Macquart. In Paris working as a laundress, she is abandoned with her young sons by her lover, Lantir. She marries a roofing engineer named Coupeau, saves enough money to open her own laundry and bears a daughter named Nana. But a fall from a roof badly injures Coupeau, and he takes to drink during his recovery. Lantier returns, Gervais suffers reverses including losing her shop, and joins Coupeau in a downward spiral of drink. It traces two branches of a single family. Said Zola, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world." Zola's shocking descriptions of conditions in working-class 19th-century Paris drew widespread admiration for his realism.

Half of Zola's novels were a set of twenty called Les Rougon-Macquart, set in France's Second Empire.

Author: Emile Zola
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Aegypan
Published: 09/01/2007
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.69lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9781603122900

About the Author
Zola, Emile: - "Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840 - 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'accuse. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902."