La Bête Humaine (French Edition)

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Zola relies way too much on telling rather than showing to pull this off, no matter how revered his books are. Not to mention that his multiple POV is confusing and awkward. I stand by what I thought: View all 23 comments. Could you kill someone? That's a rhetorical question. Think the answer to yourself in your head. We don't want to hand over compromising evidence to the prosecution in your inevitable criminal trial.

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Now I'm not asking you if you could kill in self-defense or to protect your loved ones from harm—because those cases are ethically cut-and-dried and very boring; I'm asking if you think you are capable of ending someone's life for pettier reasons: Before you don your barrister's wig and get all indignant about it, I want you to remember that the question is whether you could , not whether you would.

We don't even need to consider all or any of the deterrents that would stay your machete-wielding hand—such as moral conscience or the threat of punishment. I am only wondering if you think that, in a moment of emotional heat or psychological abandon, your mind and body would allow you to, say, pull the trigger, thrust the blade, or hold down the pillow. Assume for the sake of this discussion that you are mechanically capable or strong enough to kill your victim.

This is a question about will , not about the precision of your aim. They're having a pleasant enough lunch—when one thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, and—long story short: Talk about losing your appetite. In response to the revelation, Roubaud does what any reasonable and compassionate husband would do under the circumstances: A regular Renaissance man.

La Bête humaine by Émile Zola

He's not upset at the crime of molestation and the victimhood of his wife—he's enraged because in the used car lot of brides, he bought himself a lemon Too bad he can't trade her in for a showroom new model—but trust me here: Showroom new models are pretty hard to come by in France. Most kids have their first torrid love affairs when they're eight, I think.

He may beat her a while longer to work out his frustrations, but then he'll move on to Plan B: And—hey—since she's the lemon in this transaction, she should do some of the dirty work Am I right or am I right? You may think you've been spoiled upon, but the preceding events all occur within the first chapter. This is actually only the gentle prelude to the madness which will follow. And by madness, I'm referring particularly to the events in Chapter Ten—which, by the standards of 19th century literature, are pretty shocking and over-the-top.

Although the major characters are differently bad , none of them is perceptibly good , even in the most degraded sense of the term. We may understand them—to varying degrees—but the elaboration of their universal impulses into grisly action makes me think that Zola needed a good SSRI. And to answer my own question: I think that I could in fact summon the will if I desired, which I don't to kill someone, merely out of spite.

I recently watched the film God Bless America directed and written by Bobcat Goldthwait in which a middle-aged schlub played by the guy who plays Freddy Rumsen on Mad Men and a teenage girl go on a killing spree. Their targets are all the most loathsome people in our culture in my humble opinion, and theirs too , such as pandering political pundits, reality TV stars, people who won't shut up in movie theaters, and so on. Even though the film isn't terribly well-made on the whole, I was vicariously thrilled by it.

Apparently Bobcat Goldthwait and I have the same things stowed away in our hope chests. View all 73 comments. Jacques Lantier, a train driver, attends the crime of the president of the railway company, Grandmorin. It's a crime of revenge to punish this character of abusing Severine since his childhood.

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Jacques decided to shut up. But Jacques is inhabited by deadly impulses due to a heavy alcoholic heredity. This one is passionate about his craft and he described his "La Lison" locomotive a Jacques Lantier, a train driver, attends the crime of the president of the railway company, Grandmorin. This one is passionate about his craft and he described his "La Lison" locomotive as a person. The title "The human beast" focus throughout the book. One wonders if it is addressed to Jacques or the locomotive.

Beautiful novel by Zola which includes family Lantier. Novels are cleverly connected to each other by the author in the Rougon-Macquart series. I thought I read it in a quick read but I still left lead in the story. Must say that he goes a bit against my certainty because I am completely against determinism.

Issue of point of view that has served me well. Note that Zola had a lot to document out the novels in these series as he approached many areas with a lot of details in that.

Despite a lull near the middle of the book which is necessary for both character development and the strategic planting of later plot points, the motor on this beast of a novel, deceptively yet appropriately framed by the inner-workings of French train-lines in the latter 19th Century, continues to throttle up until its crashing finale. In case you hadn't noticed yet, I thought it was as fantastic, intelligent, frightening, and engrossing a thriller as Hollywood manages to produce on a really good day.

Having written much before cinema's time, Zola is argued to be one of, if not the greatest contributor to literary naturalism, a movement which sought through blunt, shocking prose to depict the external, uncontrollable forces resulting from living within a complex society as having an almost puppet-master effect on the thoughts and deeds of its anonymous, infinite citizenry. You are what you eat, breathe, see, suffer; environment is everything.

Furthermore, the seedier sides of life have bigger talons, gripping greater numbers and leading to a prevalence of evil over good. Life is hard, but the ones living it are even harder, and so on the wretched violence snowballs right along with the evil in men's hearts. I am not saying that I totally agree with this assessment. The troubles of the modern world aside, I am not some shoeless sort running around banging a homemade bongo talking about how much nicer it would be to live in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere surviving off of squirrel carcasses.

And let's face it: I love my bike, but please shut up about 'em already. The metaphor Zola embraces is apt for its time: It is the tarnished masculine ego, the once-wronged caveman, the Adam that Eve has manipulated and had cast from paradise, using its overwhelming force to once and for all win the battle of the sexes. It is rape, torture, and abuse, loneliness, rejection, and isolation. It is the sleek, handsome, charming serial killer.

In short, it is all together one giant, interconnected verification of the beast within man. At the same time, the train's engine is depicted as the long-sought submissive female lover. He who operates this powerful force is guiding her hand, and she obeys subserviently at long last. This leads to the rare moments of dark humor in the novel, which I will give you a little taste of now. I know that this is a long quote, but trust me when I say it is worth it. Zola didn't seem the sort to laugh much, but either he or his translator ironically named Leonard TANCOCK surely couldn't help but snicker at this gem of a passage where Zola is explaining the feelings that one male characters has for the train engine he is in charge of: So he loved Lison with masculine gratitude, for she got away or stopped promptly, like a vigorous and docile mare; he loved her because over and above his regular wages she earned him money, thanks to fuel bonuses.

She steamed so well that he saved a great deal of coal. He had only one thing against her and that was that she needed too much oiling, the cylinders in particular consumed quite unreasonable amounts of oil, an insatiable thirst, a real debauch. He had tried to keep her within bounds, but in vain. She at once got short of breath, she had to have it, it was part of her character. He had resigned himself to overlook this gluttonous passion of hers As the fire was roaring and Lison was gradually getting up pressure Jacques gave her the once-over, inspecting each one of her parts, trying to find out why that morning she had gobbled down more oil than usual.

He could find nothing amiss, she was shining and clean, with the sparkling cleanliness telling of a driver's tender care. He could constantly be seen wiping her, polishing her, particularly at the journey's end, and he rubbed her hard, just as they rub down horses steaming after a long gallop, taking advantage of the fact that she was hot so as to clean off stains and splashes more easily. He never pushed her too hard either, but kept at a regular speed, avoiding delays which necessitate unpleasant spurts to catch up.

In short, this book rules. Basically, there's a lot more going on than just trains being powerful. I guess I should've mentioned all that earlier. View all 6 comments. Nice to be back in the Zolan bosom: As usual, Zola delivers the point with the subtle wallop of a heavyweight boxer, but with his usual scalpel-sharp prose, translated here with aplomb by Mr.

View all 3 comments. Se em Germinal fiquei sensibilizada com a "humanidade" que atribuiu aos cavalos, aqui aconteceu o mesmo com os comboios. Si uccide forse ragionando? Dietro le tendine delle case borghesi si consumano drammi degni di un tugurio. I binari sono le inevitabili linee da seguire in cui scorrono ignare vite parallele. Veramente molto, molto inquietante. View all 18 comments. Alex Colville, Horse and Train , View all 15 comments. Okay folks, my first 5-star rating in I'm stingy with 5-stars, but Emile Zola delivered, again, after about 25 other books this year. When I enjoy classic writers like Thoreau, Dickens, Hawthorne or playwrights like Shakespeare or Whitman, I sometimes overlook nuances or miss the unexpected metaphor or misinterpret the character flaw that destroys the protagonist.

Not so with Zola. His themes and messages come at you like an over-steamed locomotive. Zola's characters wield their Sh Okay folks, my first 5-star rating in Zola's characters wield their Shakespearian flaws with brute force. There's no time or space for nuance, for subtleties, for guesswork. Instead, Zola bangs the reader over the head with attributes that can only be described as beastly. The actors in The Beast in Man are absolutely spring-loaded from the first 2 chapters.

Jealousy, rage, spousal abuse, murder, poisoning, and a perverse, australopithecine compulsion to kill women.

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