I’m about 90% finished reading Emile Zola’s gritty 1877 novel L’Assommoir about a working-class Parisian laundress named Gervaise and the shiftless drunkards who love her. Though I’m reading an English translation, I like to pretend that I’m absorbing enough French to warrant the many hours spent with my nose in this densely-typed, 450-paged book. Indeed, it’s the longest novel I’ve read in a few years. (Take that, faltering attention span!)
“You’re reading Zola? Huh, I read him in school,” Mr. P commented.
“Which one did you read?” I asked, since Zola was quite prolific.
“I don’t remember. I just remember that it was so boring!” he said.
I consider this. “Well, that’s why you became an engineer, because you found Zola boring,” I said. “I became an English major because Dickens enthralled me. I love this stuff.”
Indeed. The opening chapter features a rip-roaring cat fight between Gervaise and Virginie (the sister of the woman her husband runs off with) in a clothes washhouse, during which they fling pails of water at each other, exchange slaps as the spectators cry “the sluts are murdering each other!”, and then beat each other with the clothes beaters. Owing to her training as a laundress, Gervaise perseveres:
With extraordinary strength she seized Virginie round the waist and forced her over so her face was pushed down on the flagstones and her bottom was in the air; despite her struggles, Gervaise pulled her skirts all the way up. Underneath were drawers. Slipping her hand into the slit she tore them off, exposing bare thighs and bare buttocks. Then Gervaise raised her beater and began to beat… the wood smacked into the flesh with a wet thud. With each blow, a red welt appeared on the white skin. At first there was more laughter. Soon, however, cries of “stop! Stop!” began again. Gervaise didn’t hear, didn’t tire. She wanted every inch of this flesh beaten, beaten and scarlet with shame.
Anyone who calls that boring just isn’t using their imagination. Then again, the novel does proceed to very nearly gloat about the societal ills wreaked by alcohol; I can see how that would turn off most Frenchmen. As Henry Youngman once said, “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.”
