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The Joy of Life (1884)

por Émile Zola

Outros autores: Ver a secção outros autores.

Séries: Les Rougon-Macquart (12)

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"Neither spoke another word, they were gripped by a shared, unthinking madness as they plunged headlong together into vertiginous rapture."Orphaned with a substantial inheritance at the age of ten, Pauline Quenu is taken from Paris to live with her relatives, Monsieur and Madame Chanteau and their son Lazare, in the village of Bonneville on the wild Normandy coast. Her presence enlivens the household and Pauline is the only one who canease Chanteau's gout-ridden agony. Her love of life contrasts with the insularity and pessimism that infects the family, especially Lazare, for whom she develops a devoted passion. Gradually Madame Chanteau starts to take advantage of Pauline's generous nature, and jealousy and resentment threatento blight all their lives. The arrival of a pretty family friend, Louise, brings tensions to a head.The twelfth novel in the Rougon Macquart series, The Bright Side of Life is remarkable for its depiction of intense emotions and physical and mental suffering. The precarious location of Bonneville and the changing moods of the sea mirror the turbulent relations of the characters, and as the storyunfolds its title comes to seem ever more ironic.… (mais)
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"Just so long as you're happy... After all, unhappiness can come at a high price too."

Just masterful.

Pauline Quenu, the butcher's daughter from [b:The Belly of Paris|6662310|The Belly of Paris|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348413678l/6662310._SY75_.jpg|10242] (not required reading) is orphaned at age 10 and sent to live with distant relatives on the French coast. The town of Bonneville is little more than a few dozen shacks resting precariously close to a rising, angry sea, and Pauline's relatives are the only people of breeding in town - although their wealth has rapidly declined. The gout-ridden father, his nervous and immaculate wife, their spiteful servant and gloomy son, a devotee of [a:Arthur Schopenhauer|11682|Arthur Schopenhauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1404836700p2/11682.jpg], find their world unsettled by the arrival of this optimistic but moody prepubescent girl with a handy fortune kept in an upstairs room. As the years go by, the Chanteau family must navigate a delicate balance between love and freedom, hope and despair, and kindness and deceit.

Zola's 12th novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, first published in 1883, has had a rough critical time in English. Translated with the usual lack of élan and the expected delight for censorship by prudish Victorians, the complexities of the narrative were lost without Zola's monstrous set pieces and his investigations of the earthier sides of human nature. In Andrew Rothwell's note-perfect 2018 translation, hope is regained. And what an intense, philosophical novel is revealed!

The Bright Side of Life (the title is somewhat ironic, but I think some readers overstate that fact) takes place entirely within the confines of Bonneville. Zola's novels are so often explorations of "spirit of place", and so it is here. Although we follow Pauline's life for a decade (or more?) the surrounding world of Bonneville feels smaller and smaller with time. The insularity stands in stark contrast to the perpetual motion machine that was [b:The Ladies' Paradise|28413|The Ladies' Paradise|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389152174l/28413._SY75_.jpg|1540214]'s department store, or the sordid parties attended by [b:Nana|6491760|Nana (Les Rougon-Macquart, #9)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481658479l/6491760._SY75_.jpg|89633]. Instead, the author charts with pinprick-precision the emotional and philosophical development of Pauline and her cousin Lazare, watched over by the half-dozen other characters who inhabit their lives (not to mention the fantastic duo of Mathieu the dog and Minouche the cat, who exude as much complexity as any of Zola's creations!)

"I'm not worried about the unknown, it's bound to be something logical, so it's best to wait for it as calmly as possible."

Lazare's Schopenhauerian despair is pitted against Pauline's optimism - or at least idealistic pragmatism - but the novel never feels like a mere cage in which to act out philosophical experiments. Lazare is a portrait of the individual reduced to nihilism by a combination of society and circumstances (maybe my intermittent Millennial Climate Change Depression[TM] may be what draws me to him?). Doctors and thinkers of the time located the source of high rates of "neurosis" in the decadence of the Second Empire, and Lazare here is a generation at risk of being trampled under the wheel of what his forebears have done to the country around him - and its sense of intellectual self-worth. Pauline is an expansive portrayal of the growth of a mind from childhood to adulthood. She is one of the most fascinating characters Zola had yet written, certainly his most interesting female character yet, which is a feat all impressive when one considers she could easily have become a kind of modern Candide - or even the engaging but perpetually "good" Denise Baudu in The Ladies' Paradise. Quietly determined to educate herself in a world where girls are not required to have such knowledge, Pauline sets about remaking the house in her own image. Zola finds the small moments of honest in her determination, her discovery of sexuality, and her moods - a victim of her circumstances yet one who refuses to question them.

In his introduction, Rothwell quotes a letter from Zola in which the author says: "This is the novel I want to write...Not my usual symphony. A simple straightforward story...The style direct, correct, forceful, without romantic flourishes. The kind of classical language I dream of writing. In a word, honesty in everything, nothing dressed up." One gets the sense he achieved his goal.

By now in his 40s, Zola had complete command of the French reading public - although he was apparently plagued by doubts that he would die before completing his 20-volume masterpiece (mercifully for all concerned, he did not). And the novel's quiet elegance is on display throughout. Each character remains both humorous and truthfully-drawn, with the narrator's perspective shifting between them. The delicate ironies are still there - Madame Chanteau, in particular, makes a grand show of how she would never ever take any of Pauline's fortune without asking, but then must navigate to a place where she can justify the question, justify convincing Pauline to agree, and do all of this without ever truly believing she herself may be acting with ethical murkiness. The literary tours de force have rarely been stronger, notably in the 'childbirth' chapter, where the family pass a truly horrific night re-enacted in macabre, heart-pounding detail. This is the first novel in the series to be set neither in Paris (the centre of the Empire) or Plassans (a fictional Aix-en-Provence and the ancestral home of the distantly related characters who tie the series together). The removal to the Norman coast is at first discombobulating, but here Zola finds as much cause for his social soapbox as ever, in the lives of the groundlings, forgotten - never, indeed, heard of - by the city folk and out to destroy themselves as much as anyone else. Pauline's compassion for the impoverished children is tempered by a determined pragmatism; she knows that many of them will never amount to anything, and that they lie and cheat to gain more charity, but she also acknowledges that, in a choice between helping someone or not helping, one with the means to help only has one ethical option. Lazare and the Chanteau family, meanwhile, are more concerned with their individual needs, even perhaps a solipsistic view of the world. What Lazare gains that his parents do not is that sense, fearfully just out of sight but not quite out of mind, that all life is emptiness without perhaps engaging in some of this meaningful behaviour. Whether the startling ending supports Pauline's view or Lazare's is up to the reader, and I'm not sure I feel ready to make that choice.

And behind all of this, forever visible in the distance, lies the sea. In [b:A Love Story|34927484|A Love Story (Les Rougon-Macquart, #8)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497282194l/34927484._SY75_.jpg|1776975], Zola interspersed his narrative with five impressionist views of Paris from above, each mirroring the changing emotions of that book's heroine. Here, he takes this conceit further, interweaving the sounds and smells and sights of the Channel (or, under the circumstances I suppose, la Manche) throughout the life of Pauline Quenu. She seems from first glance to be at one with the sea. She brings with her this natural force, and its salt and spray revive her. It is the site of love and discovery, and her reactions to the water - and, indeed, the reactions of others to her precious jewel - tell us much about them. But, like everything in this novel, there is murkiness. The sea is the great life-giver and a source of endless potential (Lazare's get-rich-quick scheme involves finding revolutionary uses for seaweed) but to the people of Bonneville, it is an assassin, creeping in by night and approaching their homes ever more closely, with malicious intent. The sea is that which takes away too, the harbinger of oblivion.

Somewhere between these two views lies La Joie de vivre. ( )
  therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Zola's story is about a middle class Normandy family that is set in the last part of the 19th century. Here is a quote from the preface:

"Lazare, on the other hand, is one of those wretched beings whose number seem to be constantly increasing in our midst, the product of our corrupt civilization, our grotesque educational systems, our restlessness and thirst for wealth, our thousand vices and our blatant hypocrisy."

Written by the translator, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, I thought this was a modern commentary, written in a modern printing. Noooo, he lived at the end of the 19th century, as Zola did.

I cried when the family dog, Mathew, grown old and suffering from cancer of the kidneys, died.

"'oh! My poor old dog!' cried Lazare, bursting into sobs. Matthew was dead. A little bloody foam Frothed round his Jaws. As Lazare laid him down on the floor he looked as though he were asleep. Then once more the young man felt that all was over. His dog was dead now, and this filled him with unreasonable grief and seemed to cast a gloom over his whole life."

If you have read"The Belly of Paris," you know that Pauline was the darling daughter of the Quenus, who had a"meat" shop by the Public Market in Paris. Her parents have died, and she is sent to live with her father's brother in a coastal village in Normandy. She has a nice little inheritance that no doubt makes her welcome in this family. But little by little, the aunt digs into Pauline's inheritance.

If you have ever known someone who lives to be a martyr, you will recognize them in Pauline, and you will feel like strangling Pauline as you read this tale.

Awesome characterization. ( )
  burritapal | Oct 23, 2022 |
So, after the sex-and-shopping of Au bonheur des dames, Zola comes up with an indisputable beach novel. No-one can say he wasn't ready for the airport-bookstall era...

The basic scenario of this novel is very simple: little Pauline comes to live with her aunt and uncle in a remote village on the Normandy coast after the death of her parents. One horror after another strikes the family, in the gratuitous kind of way only Hardy and Zola can get away with, and Pauline herself has to cope with some pretty nasty stuff in her life, but (without resort to religion) she somehow manages to retain almost Ann-of-Green-Gables levels of optimism whilst all around her are dying in excruciating pain, losing their homes to floods, failing in business, etc. And by some miracle, Zola manages to make her a likeable and sympathetic central character despite this.

Having discovered the value of obstetrics as a way of building a climactic scene in Pot-bouille, Zola goes one better here, with what Yves Berger claims in the preface of my edition must be the longest and most gruesomely-detailed childbirth scene in French literature. If it isn't, by any chance, I'm pretty sure I don't want to read the book that outdoes it. But again, it's not gratuitous, it's there to remind us of the absolute horror that the most normal event in life can turn into, the pain women are expected to go through, and the rather inadequate resources of the medical profession of the time for dealing with it ("...I can save either your wife or your baby...").

He also scores what must surely be another first here by bringing in menstruation as a major symbolic element. Being Zola, it is not delicately and indirectly alluded to: we get all the gory details we would like. And of course there is a social point to make here as well as a symbolic one: Zola shows us the imbecility of Mme Chanteau's reluctance to explain to her ward what's happening to her body when she bleeds for the first time. Fortunately, Pauline happens to be in a position to deal with the question by reading it up in her cousin's medical books, and copes in a very enlightened modern way. She continues to alarm other characters throughout the book with how clued-up she is about sex and unembarrassed talking about it: obviously Zola wants us to see how much better life would be for young women if they all acted like that.

Other than the ob/gyn element of the book, we get some hardline rural poverty (including domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, and all the rest), seaweed chemistry, coastal defence (four years before Der Schimmelreiter), veterinary problems of dogs and cats, and the usual financial/inheritance/dowry shenanigans. And quite a bit of Schopenhauer — obviously Zola felt things were at risk of becoming too cheerful if he didn't deploy some heavy weapons...

A relatively minor work in the sequence, but still with some interesting ideas and subject-matter. ( )
  thorold | Nov 22, 2019 |
Translated into English in 2019 for only the second time since the heavily edited and expurgated 1901 version, The Bright Side of Life is a lesser known book in Zola's Rougon Macquart saga. This is regrettable, for in it Zola has created in Pauline Quenu a character as compelling as Claude Lantier or Jean Macquart.

First encountered as a young child in The Belly of Paris, she in now an orphaned ten year old. Her father had appointed his cousin Chanteau as her guardian. The Chanteau family lived on the coast of Normandy. They were happy to receive the young girl. Especially so was Mme Chanteau, enticed by the idea of Pauline's 150,000 franc inheritance. Pauline too was happy in her new life, so far from the world of Paris. She loved the seashore, the animals, and her newly met cousin Lazare. Although almost nine years older, Lazare was happy to spend time with Pauline, and the two developed a strong bond.

All went well until the onset of puberty. With no foreknowledge of the event, and no ensuing guidance from Mme Chanteau, Pauline was convinced she was dying. Here the story takes an unexpected turn for a nineteenth century girl. Lazare had by this time given up his earlier idea of becoming a great composer, and had turned instead to the study of medicine. Although he was in Paris studying, some of his books were still in the house. Pauline turned to them.
As soon as her aunt's back was turned, she would take them out, then calmly put them back at the slightest sound, acting not like a girl with a guilty curiosity, but a studious one whose family were standing in the way of her vocation... And so this child of fourteen learnt... hers was a serious purpose, going from the organs that give life to those that regulate it, sustained and preserved from carnal ideas by the love of all that was healthy. The gradual discovery of this human machine filled her with admiration. She read all about it with a passion... she revived her earlier dream of learning everything in order to cure everything.

Zola had reversed the expected roles of his time. Pauline becomes a strong, steady presence, growing into a capable and loved manager of the household, with a solid grounding in reality. Lazare, by contrast, moved from one interest to another, unable to summon the discipline to persevere, squandering his life and the lives of those closest to him. Zola's ideas on empiricism versus romanticism are captured in this little family.

In his introduction, Andrew Rothwell says that after completing [Nana] (1880), Zola wanted to write about something more domestic, saying in his preliminary notes "This is the novel I want to write. Good, honest people placed in a drama that will develop the ideas of goodness and pain." However, a mental health crisis saw him turn instead to writing Pot Luck (1882) and The Ladies' Paradise (1883). He was then able to turn once again to The Bright Side of Life.

Some critics have found Pauline too bland and saintly. Rothwell feels this may be due to the 1901 Vizetelly translation*, which deleted so much of the content that served to demonstrate the strength of Pauline's character. In contrast, Rothwell says that in France the novel is regarded as "one of the finest love stories of the nineteenth century".

The Bright Side of Life is an oddity in the Rougon Macquart cycle. Like The Dream, the plot bears little relation to other characters in the saga. Pauline comes from the illegitimate side of the family, but apart from sporadic fits of jealousy, little of the Macquart tainted character emerges. Yet Pauline is Nana's first cousin. Both girls were born in 1852 and knew each other as small children. Zola decided Pauline would be "... the radical opposite of Nana, ... where Nana was unleashed on the world with no moral compass, no social or religious inhibitions, ... she will... have values, but above all, she will produce virtue, as Nana produced vice."

Perhaps Zola was feeling more hopeful about life. Yet despite all intentions to create a positive force in Pauline, there is still an overwhelming pessimism here. Still writing in top form, Zola has written a childbirth scene here just as rivetiing as his death scene in [Nana]. Although the Chanteau family starts out with the best of intentions, little by little these melt away, and her guardians ultimately fail Pauline. The village loses its battle with the sea. The final scene, which seems to come out of the blue, offers little hope for the future. Paulne may have a joie de vivre, but this is classic Zola.

________________
*Caution when choosing an edition to read. Vizetelly is still the only other readily available translation in English, even including a 2016 Kindle edition.
1 vote SassyLassy | Aug 23, 2019 |
The Joy of Life by Emile Zola

This is one of the less well-known of the Rougon-Macquart novels. While not among the top tier of the series, it is one that deserves to be more widely read.

The Rougon-Macquart connection is Pauline Quenu, the protagonist. She is the daughter of the owners of the butcher shop featured in The Belly of Paris. As the novel opens she is 9 years old and has been orphaned. She, along with her ample inheritance, is sent to live with distant relatives, an older couple, the Chanteaus, and their 19 year old son, Lazare. The Chanteaus are retired "gentry", and live in reduced circumstances in a fishing village on the North Coast of France.

Pauline forms an immediate bond with Lazare, and idolizes him. He is a dilettante, and is unable to decide what to do with his life. When Pauline first meets him, he is composing a "masterpiece" symphony. When he gets bored with this, he goes to Paris to study medicine. When he fails his exams, he studies science. He does not complete these studies, but returns home confident that he can start a successful business involving seaweed extractions. Lazare's various enterprises are expensive, and one after the other they fail. The Chanteaus begin using Pauline's inheritance to finance Lazare's continuing unsuccessful enterprises. Soon, they are also relying on Pauline's money to fund their everyday living expenses (above and beyond the expenses of her keep they have been legitimately paid). When Pauline comes of age, and they face an audit, they arrive at a convenient way to settle matters: Pauline and Lazare will become engaged. Pauline is amenable, since she has always adored Lazare, and he in his own way also loves her. As her fiancé, neither he nor his parents will have to repay Pauline, and it will furthermore be all to Pauline's advantage, since Lazare is so brilliant. It will be no surprise that none of Lazare's enterprises are successful, and that the Pauline and Lazare's relationship is not smooth. Pauline is at times a "too good to be true" character, but within the context of a 19th century novel she is believable and steadfast. She remains loyal to Madame Chanteau, even when Madame Chanteau has turned on her, perhaps out of shame from having depleted Pauline's fortune. She serves as an uncomplaining nurse to Monsieur Chanteau, who suffers from crippling gout. And despite all the trials and tribulations, she loves and remains true to Lazare.

All the characters in this book are well-drawn. One thing that I have not before noticed in Zola is the prominent role played by the family pets, Matthew the dog and Minouche the cat, whose characters are also well-developed. In fact, the death of Matthew is portrayed in a manner worthy of Dickens, and goes on for pages--certainly it is featured more prominently than the death of Madame Chanteau.

The other factor I particularly enjoyed in this novel is the setting on the northern coast. The fishing village itself is being slowing eaten by the encroaching sea. In winter, there are violent storms, yet Pauline and Lazare spend idyllic summer days on the beach. All of this is very atmospheric, and the feel of an ocean shore permeates the novel. ( )
2 vote arubabookwoman | May 20, 2013 |
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"Neither spoke another word, they were gripped by a shared, unthinking madness as they plunged headlong together into vertiginous rapture."Orphaned with a substantial inheritance at the age of ten, Pauline Quenu is taken from Paris to live with her relatives, Monsieur and Madame Chanteau and their son Lazare, in the village of Bonneville on the wild Normandy coast. Her presence enlivens the household and Pauline is the only one who canease Chanteau's gout-ridden agony. Her love of life contrasts with the insularity and pessimism that infects the family, especially Lazare, for whom she develops a devoted passion. Gradually Madame Chanteau starts to take advantage of Pauline's generous nature, and jealousy and resentment threatento blight all their lives. The arrival of a pretty family friend, Louise, brings tensions to a head.The twelfth novel in the Rougon Macquart series, The Bright Side of Life is remarkable for its depiction of intense emotions and physical and mental suffering. The precarious location of Bonneville and the changing moods of the sea mirror the turbulent relations of the characters, and as the storyunfolds its title comes to seem ever more ironic.

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