Germinal
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Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart #13)

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3.97 of 5 stars 3.97  ·  rating details  ·  4,039 ratings  ·  265 reviews
The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine w...more
Mass Market Paperbound, 592 pages
Published May 25th 2004 by Penguin Books (first published 1885)
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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 7,500)
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Jason
Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars
Felt like reading a Naturlist, and I remembered Zola. Germinal was the only Zola novel on the library shelf, and I chose it merely in deferrence to the author. Little did I know that many critics believe Germinal is one of the 10 best French novels ever written.

I like stories where people are ground down by nature--poverty, weather, work conditions, hunger--and the lower economic demographic is forced to suffer and survive. The Industrial Revolution offered so many ways to catal...more
Aaron
Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars
Germinal is Zola's supposed masterpiece chronicling a miner's strike in a French coal-mining town. I expected a thoroughly depressing book, and that's what I got.

I had a couple of issues with the book. First of all, the main characters felt very flat. There wasn't much to interest you in them, especially the main character, Etienne. The most interesting characters Souvarine, Bonnemort, Jeanlin, Deneulin, get reduced to bit roles and instead you're just left with fragments of ...more
Graham
GERMINAL - what can I say? I studied this book at university and my whole degree course was worth the time and effort just for introducing me to the author. GERMINAL now stands as my favourite book of all time, an intense masterpiece of fiction.

The basic storyline is a miner's strike. It doesn't sound too good or too detailed, but it's all here: politics, chaos, social realism, a love story, an action story, heroes and villains, the good and the bad. Yes, it is melodramatic, but I gu...more
MJ Nicholls
This novel is about as grim and horrendous as literature gets. Instead of ranting about the history of human suffering at various pitches of bowel-plopping rage, let me take a more facetious route. Let me instead discuss various mining experiences lived out on the Sega Mega Drive. Remember Mega Bomberman? Those who do will remember the mine level.

description

This level was pivotal in the game, since here a remote-controlled power-up was available which was crucial for facing down the...more
Rob
Rob rated it 1 of 5 stars
Shelves: college
See also: my review of Cousin Bette.

An assigned reading for a college class. My "classics" digestion enzyme was not being secreted. I failed to appreciate it.

A classic? Perhaps. A masterful depiction of its era? Perhaps. At all enjoyable? Not by me and certainly not at the time.

And once again: it seems there are so many positive reviews of the text that I ought re-visit it. (We'll see...)
Leftbanker
Moi, je vois autrement. Je n’ai guère de souci et de beauté et de perfection. Je me moque des grands siècles. Je n’ai souci que de vie, de lutte, de fièvre. -Émile Zola

Zola is the supreme novelist, at least how I interpret that vocation. Like Dickens, Zola went out and studied France and her people for inspiration while Proust sat in a cork-lined room and dreamed up all of his stories in his head. I'll take journalism over the human imagination any day. Germinal is the essence of thi...more
William
William rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: Erin, Katy
In 1871, Zola began a 20 volume series called Les Rougon-Macquart of which Germinal is the 13th, written in 1885. The series chronicles the life of one extended family in a tale that explores the class structure in France during the Second Empire. While he surveys the society from top to bottom, he is also weaves in the influence of environment and heredity on position and behavior. Its an incredible series, and as each novel is its own character study, between the first and the last books, you...more
Ensiform
Ensiform rated it 3 of 5 stars
Shelves: fiction, french
Translated by Havelock Ellis. This 480-page monster is a novel about the exploitation of poor workers by the idle bourgeoisie. The plot was well-crafted, and the characters were well-rounded and realistic: some workers were bastards, some of the “masters” kind-hearted --- although totally naive about the condition of their workers. There was perhaps too much purple prose, but the scenes of destruction (as when the strikers cut the elevator wires in one pit, and the workers inside 700 ladders ...more
Mandy
Mandy rated it 4 of 5 stars
I learnt a lot from reading this book about what it is like to live a miner's life underground. About the hard work that goes into mining especially in the olden days. How hard it would be to live underground and the darkness that oppresses people and the continual struggle to meet daily mining quota just to eat. The worry that you could be killed by a rockfall at any moment and the perpetual fear for your life in one way or the other. The extreme poverty and destitution that comes with bein...more
Peter
Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars
"Gripping tale of a coal mine strike in 1860s France. Somewhat political, which to be honest, wasn't the biggest draw for me. However, the tale is humanized by heartbreaking poverty of the miners. Led by idealistic, naive Etienne Lantier, and enwidened by his interactions with the endlessly put upon Maheu family, and in particular their lovely daughter Catherine, who shares an ill-fated affair with Etienne. The rest of the town and management and their families are beautifully realized ...more
Mary
Working conditions in an 1866 French coal mine:
"The four hewers had just taken up position, stretched out at different levels one above the other and covering the entire height of the coal-face. Wooden planks, secured by hooks, stopped the coal from falling after they had cut it, and between these planks each man occupied a space of about four metres along the seam. This particular seam was so thin, barely fifty centimetres at this point, that they found themselves virtually crushed b...more
Jim Neeley
"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.", (from My Hates, Emile Zola 1866)

It was an unnerving coincidence that I started reading this epic novel of a French mine disaster and labor strike as the events at Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, which resulted in the loss of 29 lives. The story is long gone from the media, but reading the book I kept...more
Aiko
Aiko rated it 5 of 5 stars
Germinal is the one story that made me feel all emotion. It accounts the general unfairness of the world with the separation of people into classes—conventionally the bourgeoisie or the masters, and the serfs and the slaves--and details on the conflicts between them. It also suggests ways upon which such a system could be abolished—presenting many socialist theories, mainly anarchy. In the end, though the capitalists remained victor, since the poor had so much more to lose, the book still gives...more
Moon 佛月球 Будда Луны
∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝•THE CLAMOR FOR SOCIAL EQUITY•∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝

Germinal refers to the season of spring, the time of renewal when the seed of life starts to sprout again from the ground, germinating hope after the long dormancy of winter.

Émile Zola symbolically refers to this spring of hope as the wretched lives of the coal miners, amidst the sour inflictions of deprivation, leading to their depraved lives, slowly awaken from their long years of passive obedience, allowing them to see a...more
Angie
Angie rated it 3 of 5 stars
Mid Feb: Finished last night and this book is exactly what I love in a novel: international and depressing. If you like books about other countries where your favorite characters live miserable lives and then die, this book is for you. The writing was excellent, the mines described adequately but not in agonizing detail, and the characters, though there were MANY, were well developed. Zola really captured the small town dynamic. I didn't like that there were two actual murders that were no...more
Paul Sheckarski
At this point in his career Zola had achieved a mastery of voice, and leaps from vicious criticism of the bourgeois to: sympathetic inhabitation of Monsieur Hennebeau's quiet, desperate life; celebration of Deneulin's heroism & courage; and exposals of the mob's ugly & illogical whims. Furthermore, Zola writes within each of these voices either tinged with irony or straight-faced, as the moment calls for it. This has undoubtedly led many readers to think of Zola as a mere ideologue. Though it is...more
Petra X
Petra X rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: People who like literature, who like socially-relevant stories and delight in a good, long book.
Shelves: fiction
Part of the 20-vol Rougon-Marquart cycle. All the books are good and very differerent, but Nana stands out as being as relevant now as then, as in any time in fact. The girl with the pretty face and no moral problem about capitalising it becomes the most-highly paid courtesan in Paris but looks don't last.
Venus

ژرمینال[Germinal] رمانی از امیل زولا(1)(1840-1902)، نویسنده­ی فرانسوی، که در 1885 منتشر شد. این سیزدهمین کتاب از دوره­ی خانواده­ی روگون ماکار، یکی از مشهورترین آثار نویسنده است. زولا خود چنین اظهار می­دارد که ماجرا بر سر یک اعتصاب است، «قیام حقوق بگیران و فشار به جامعه­ای که یک لحظه از هم می­پاشد و، در یک کلام، مبارزه­ی سرمایه و کار. اهمیت کتاب در این است، و می­خواهم که ناظر بر آینده باشد و مسئله­ای را مطرح کند که مهم­ترین مسئله قرن بیستم خواهد بود
Kingfan30
I was initially surprised to find my self enjoying it to start with, the descriptions of the mines, the poverty all seemed very real. When the strike finally happened it all got very political and I found myself a bit bored, the descriptions of speeches and riots seemed to go on for pages. The side I held my interest more was when it returned back to how the families were coping with no money coming in, the fact that could take clothes and stuffing from a mattress to a shop and get money for it ...more
Jean
In GERMINAL, Zola carried me deep into the unfamiliar world of French coalminers circa 1860. Here is a story of people trying to do the right thing, trying to justify that what they are already doing is right, and sometimes getting swept away--even to the point of violence--in the name of Right. It is a world where sex is animalistic and associated more with death than life; where the frilly, well-fed rich blind themselves to the humanity of the poor; where, among the starving workers, loyalty a...more
Leonard
The wobbly cages descending into the pit, miners half-naked toiling in the scorching darkness of the mine’s galleries, the veins bursting and flooding the passages, the meager wages the miners receive at the end of the day, the wives desperately scouring for gruel each meal, the parents giving their daughters to the grocer to get flour and sugar; all recounted in a calmly detached voice.

Etienne, a vagrant worker, joined the fraternity and dissatisfied with the inhuman daily drudges ...more
Sabrina1984
Sabrina1984 rated it 5 of 5 stars
Shelves: literature
"Es waren wohl Liebesleute, die Lippe auf Lippe dahinwandelten, für ihn ein gewohnter Anblick. Mädchen und junge Männer, die sich das einzige Vergnügen gönnten, das nichts kostete. Und diese Verblendeten, die das einzige Glück, das es gab, das Glück der Liebe, in vollen Zügen genießen konnten, sie beklagten sich über das Leben! Gerne hätte er gehungert wie sie, wenn er das Leben von neuem hätte beginnen können mit einer Frau, die sich ihm mit der Vollkraft ihres Herzens schenkte! Für sein U...more
Emily
What to say? This was without question the most depressing book I've ever read. It just kept getting worse. I cried. But it was so powerful, that idea of the workers trudging day after day, a mute herd, trying to break free of it, the power of a mob turning things into chaos, crisis after crisis, then... back to the mines. I'm not sure yet of Zola's political stance; one thing I'm sure of, he doesn't think that any sudden rebellion or Souvarine's anarchy is going to work. He's too much of a rati...more
Emily
When I noticed, over on the Classics Circuit blog, that the April tours would focus on French Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola, it seemed like a great opportunity to continue with my pledge to read more literature in French, and expose myself to the father of French naturalism, whose work I had never read. What better starting point than his acknowledged masterpiece, the tale of a harrowing coal-mining strike in the Normandy of the 1860s?

When my edition of Germinal arrived in the ma...more
lyell bark
i'm glad that in the 21st the industrialized aspects of capitalism have been nicely abstracted and put at a geographic remove becasue it sounds really unpleasant, good thing i can sit around and play videogames and be alienated from everything these days instead of going into a mine or whatever.

also it's cool at french novelists from at least rabeleis on down to houellebecq throw the "f" word and the "c" word all over the place and have scenes of mass copulation, al...more
F.R.
This is the very definition of a book that’s easier to admire than love.

I appreciated how brilliantly evocative it was and how keen the narrator’s eye is in making sure no detail of these character’s lives is missed. It’s brilliantly written. However it’s a long book with few light moments, which meant picking it up and reading it was occasionally daunting. It is all very well to write a book about the agony of work, but it shouldn’t be work to actually read up. That said, the drama ...more
Helynne
Emile Zola, is THE naturalist novelist of France. Naturalism means that he probes the most unpleasant, dificult and sometimes disgusting aspects of French society in the mid- to late 19th century. In his long, intertwined series of novels on various members of the Rougon-Marquart families, Zola analyzes the long-term effects of mental discrubances on one family and alcoholism on the other. As an aside, Zola was a courageous humanitarian as seen in his stand against anti-semitism and his defen...more
Dan
Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Shelves: 2008
i wanted a big, every-strata-of-the-social-sphere type thing to dive into recently, and this was it! totally panoramic from beginning to end, and inquisitive enough to make up for its occasionally thin character development.

the story concerns a labor strike in the coal mines of northern france towards the end of the 19th century. it's grim and explicit (LOTS of sex and violence... i was shocked!), but carries a surprisingly level head about its politics. some of the characters are es...more
Kate
Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars
Although I found this book pretty captivating, I think I probably felt differently about the characters than I was expected to. Etienne in the end strikes me as heartless, narcissistic, and some other word that I can't think of right now that basically means "ambitious to the point of using those close to him in order to get to where he wants to be." I don't know if it was supposed to be ironic that he yearned to be just like the bourgeois that he was fighting, and pontificated about...more
Heather
I am so glad to be done with this book! It is a French novel about oppressed coal miners in the 1800s who band together under the leadership of a newcomer with budding socialist and communistic ideals to strike against the mining company. Nothing good happens and I just couldn't get into all the revolutionary monologue. Plus the translation I read was not very well done, so it made for hard reading. Perhaps I would have liked it more with a better translation.

There was a passage ...more
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Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)
Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13) (Penguin Classics)
Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)
ژرمینال
Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)

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