The Ladies’ Paradise – 4 stars
Denise Baudu comes dirt-poor to Paris with her younger brothers to work at her uncle’s shop, but instead goes to work at its greatest competitor – the ever-growing department store the Ladies’ Paradise, presided over by the Great Seducer Octave Mouret, who falls in love with Denise only to find out she may be one of the only things in the world he cannot buy.
I was in the mood for a Victorian novel, but none of the usual writers appealed. So I decided to head across the Channel and crack open my first Zola. I picked this specific book mostly because it was the soonest available at the library.
The rapidly transforming Paris of the Second Empire period is drawn vividly, and the battle by the small shops to not be ground under the heel of the Ladies’ Paradise makes for a compelling conflict. Denise is a sweet, likable main character, and I enjoyed her romance with Mouret even though it only came into the forefront in the last third of the book.
As for the Ladies’ Paradise itself – I felt my senses as overwhelmed by Zola’s descriptions of the interiors and the displays and the products as the customers probably were by the actual experience of them, which is probably the point. Unlike the characters though, I could skim past when I found myself becoming suffocated, and often did.
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Nana – 5 stars
When Nana makes her debut upon the Parisian stage, she is immediately the talk of the town. When men start falling for her charms, she begins to amass fame and fortune at a breakneck pace. But the higher she rises, the further she has to fall…
This is an intense and frantic book yanked, as are all the characters, in the wake of the irrepressible Nana, who is a prototype of the femme fatale if I’ve ever seen one. The seedy underbelly of 19th century Paris, the world of sex workers and the stage, really comes to fetid, stinking life. And Zola’s exceedingly descriptive prose lands perfectly, allowing the reader to envision every sight and smell.
Men really do ruin their lives for Nana, but you don’t mind very much. Nana’s consumption of them is all about the mere extraction of wealth and enjoyment, but you never do lose sight of the fact that she is only devouring them as they have devoured the working class of Paris. In the final chapters as the roll call of the ruined grows, it really does boggle the mind to look back and see in their center the laughter-loving Nana, who is really just doing as well as for herself as she can and has no idea why all these men have to be so stupid about it.
She must of course, she be a fast-living kind and this book a 19th-century novel, come to her prescribed bad end at the end of the book. But what a journey on the way there, and what havoc she’s wreaked!