The Kill (La Curée) - Emile Zola

The Kill (La Curée) is the second novel in the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle by Émile Zola. The story focuses on Aristide Rougon, who changes his name to Saccard and tries to rise in social status in Paris during the French Second Empire.Aristide Rougon, who moves from Plassans to Paris to become rich. At first, he works as a clerk, but after his wife dies, he becomes more ambitious. With the help of his sister, he marries Renée, a wealthy young woman who is pregnant and needs a husband to protect her reputation. Through this marriage, Saccard gains money and social status.

Aristide is greedy, yet he remains respectable in society, much like the other Rougons, whose reputation is built on wealth and social status. Aristide is cold and distant; he is rarely at home, as he is constantly occupied with business. Even his marriage is treated as a financial arrangement rather than a relationship based on love. The family’s fragile balance begins to shift when Maxime Saccard, Aristide’s son from his first marriage, comes to live with them. His presence introduces a quiet but disturbing change, reflecting the moral emptiness of the household and gradually fallen into primitive desire.

Renée’s identity depends on being seen as rich and elegant; without that image, she loses her place in society. But inside, she feels empty and bored. She once wanted to feel alive, and in the end, she no longer knows what to want at all. Aristide, on the other hand, seems born to make money. He moves on easily after what Renée did, as if nothing happened. It feels harsh, but this is what Émile Zola calls naturalism: different people survive in different ways. Aristide follows one strong goal (a kind of monomania), and that is why he survives and still respectable in society while Renée does not.

The background of this novel is  so much interesting because we also can learn history, Set during the French Second Empire, when Paris was being rebuilt and modernized. Napoleon III instructed Haussmann to bring air and light to the centre of Paris, to unify the different neighbourhoods with boulevards, and to make Paris more beautiful. Haussmann transformed Paris by building wide boulevards, uniform apartment buildings, parks, and modern infrastructure. Before this modernization, Paris was overcrowded, with narrow streets, working-class neighborhoods, and old houses. As a result, entire districts were demolished to make way for the new city. In the novel, Aristide Saccard is essentially a property speculator. He makes money by buying land or houses cheaply before redevelopment, anticipating where changes will occur, and then selling the property later at a much higher price.

Paris after Hausman's development :

You should read The Kill If you want to explore more the world of the Les Rougon-Macquart, which gives an intense look at the Rougon side. Then you can continue with The Money, which follows Aristide Saccard’s life after this story and shows his ambition on a bigger financial scale. Each novel can stand alone, but reading more will help you see how the characters and themes connect across the series.

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✬✬✬✬ (4/5)
Title : The Kill
Author : Émile Zola
Publisher : Oxford World Classics
Year : July, 2008 (First Published in 1871)
Format / Pages : Softcover / 320 pages
ISBN : 9780199536924

The Conquest of Plassans - Emile Zola

At first, I told myself I’d read just one book a year from Émile Zola, but after finishing The Kill (La Curée) in a week, that plan didn’t stand a chance. I had to keep going. So I picked up The Conquest of Plassans, still within the Rougon family circle. This time, we follow Marthe Rougon, now married to her cousin François Mouret, living a quiet, orderly life with their children, Octave (The Ladies' Paradise), Serge (The Sin of Abbé Mouret), and Désirée. Zola gently introduces their domestic world, calm on the surface, but already hinting at something more fragile underneath.

Then comes the arrival of Abbé Faujas, a priest who rents rooms on the second floor. His presence is quiet, controlled, and strangely heavy, hard to read, yet impossible to ignore. There’s also something unexpectedly amusing in Mouret’s character. At first, he’s quite pleased to take in a lodger for the extra income, but almost immediately, he grows uneasy, suspicious in a way he can’t quite explain. It’s a subtle, almost ironic kind of humor. He wants the money, yet feels he may have invited something unsettling into his own home.

Who exactly is Faujas? What kind of priest is he, and how does he relate to the other abbés in town? Zola doesn’t rush to answer, but you can already feel that his role will be far from ordinary. A slow beginning, touched with irony and tension, I’m curious and a little uneasy to see where this goes.

From the glamorous life in The Kill, moving into The Conquest of Plassans feels like a shift I didn’t expect to enjoy this much. I find myself drawn to this quieter nuance. From watching the cold, ambitious Aristide Rougon, I now see Mouret as a domestic, almost gentle family man. From the vast, lonely mansion in Paris, the story brings me into a small, quiet house in the provinces. The scale becomes smaller, but somehow the tension feels closer, more intimate.

While reading this, I noticed that each main character is driven by a different kind of fear. Marthe fears spiritual failure, and Félicité fears losing status and control. But Mouret, most of all, fears being betrayed and surrounded. He loves his family and wants everything to remain orderly, just as it has always been. For him, the house with its beautiful and peaceful garden, also becomes a symbol of the stillness and stability he tries to protect. In contrast, Faujas and the Trouches seem almost fearless, which makes them even more dangerous in how they take control.

Zola shows that fear can grow into paranoia and eventually turn into aggression or violence. He also suggests that inherited tendencies can shape a person’s behavior. However, this raises a question: if someone lives a normal and peaceful life, might those impulses stay hidden instead of turning into madness?

Extras:

The fictional town of Plassans is generally considered to be based on Aix-en-Provence, where Émile Zola spent his childhood until about the age of ten. In 1858, the Zola family then moved to Paris.

Aix-en-Provence now

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✬✬✬✬✬ (5/5)
Title : The Conquest of Plassans
Author : Émile Zola
Publisher : Oxford World Classics
Year : September, 2014 (First Published in 1874)
Format / Pages : Softcover / 307 pages
ISBN : 9780199664788

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Middlemarch is an important landmark in nineteenth-century English literature. It shows the everyday life of people living in a provincial town in England and highlights their struggles and hopes. Through different characters from various social classes, George Eliot presents multiple points of view, helping readers understand how complex society and human relationships can be.

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments,...."

Nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke, a woman steadfast in her principles, astonishes all of Middlemarch by accepting the proposal of a forty-five-year-old man, the somewhat ill-bred scholar Rev. Edward Casaubon. This choice suggests that Dorothea’s feelings are not based on physical or romantic attraction. Instead, she idealizes the intellectual and religious qualities of the historian, seeing him as a kind of role model and believing that supporting his work will give greater purpose to her life. But, when Dorothea saw Will Ladislaw (the cousin of Casaubon), she felt the feeling like she never felt before.

Alongside this, another set of relationships develops around the Vincy family, whose members share a desire to improve their social position. Rosamond Vincy, who never imagined marrying a man from Middlemarch, becomes interested in a visiting doctor, Tertius Lydgate. Meanwhile, her brother Fred Vincy is lazy, fond of gambling, and deeply in debt, though he hopes to inherit his uncle’s estate. Fred wishes to marry Mary Garth, but he is still uncertain about how to deal with the responsibilities and difficulties of life. At first, the stories of the three main characters remain separate, each following its own path. However, the author gradually intertwines them, since they are all residents of the small town of Middlemarch and encounter one another on various occasions.

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”

George Eliot hints at the unhappy marriages of both Casaubon and Lydgate. It seems that Dorothea and Rosamond both find married life different from what they expected. Dorothea is treated coldly by Casaubon; although she is eager to help him with his book, The Key to All Mythologies, he believes she is incapable of assisting him. Holding a religious position does not automatically make someone humble and empathetic, this the author hints Edward Casaubon seems very cruel to her cousin and Dorothea, because of his jelousy, he makes a will that Dorothea will not inherit Lowick Manor if she marries Ladislaw. 

On the other hand, Rosamond appears to be a cheerful wife, but she has been raised to think that a wife’s role is mainly to please and entertain her husband. She does not fully understand that medical work requires long-term effort and dedication. When Lydgate is absent, she seeks attention and distraction elsewhere. Because of this, many readers tend to dislike Rosamond, as her actions create further problems in their marriage. 

I really like the quote from The Maid's Tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher that Eliot spills on the first chapter:

‘Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it,’

because it strongly resonates with George Eliot as a woman, and with Dorothea Brooke herself. It reflects the limitations placed on women, but also their desire to still do something meaningful. After becoming a widow, Dorothea wants to turn her ideals into real social improvement, such as her donation for the hospital and  especially through estate management, which was unusual for a woman. With the help of Caleb Garth, she plans to build better cottages for the tenants. This also connects back to the first chapter, when she designs model cottages. In the end, she finally achieves what she wanted, as marriage is no longer a limitation.

How much can one intelligent, idealistic individual actually change a whole community? The way George Eliot describes the town is interesting because Middlemarch almost feels like a character in the story. It is a traditional provincial town where people strongly follow old customs and are suspicious of new ideas. People still gossiping and prejudice, they are not ready for the changes medicine that Lydgate brings from London. Many villagers still think doctors are similar to quacks. Lydgate, however, represents a more modern doctor who studies the human body to improve medical knowledge. In one part, he examines a dead body for research, but the people of the town think this is disrespectful. This shows how the townspeople do not understand new scientific methods and prefer to hold on to their traditional beliefs.

This book is nearly one thousand pages long, and at times it can feel quite verbose. However, Eliot’s ‘verbosity’ often works as a kind of intellectual commentary on human life. Eliot’s narrator often feels thoughtful and philosophical. It's different from what I read before,  The Mill on The Floss, in Middlemarch, Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) really wanted to show off her high education and her interested in mythology, classical philosophy and earlier literature which appear in both the narration and the characters’ conversations.

In the end, reading Middlemarch feels like taking a long train journey: the destination is far, but the changing views along the way keep it engaging, and by the time you arrive, you see things from a new perspective. I like the way this book ending with justice for Ladislaw and the happines for Fred and Mary. Five Star for Middlemarch !

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✭✭✭✭✭ (5/5)
Title : Middlemarch
Author : George Eliot
Publisher : Penguin English Library
Year : 2012 (First Published in 1872)
Format / Pages : Softcover / 923 pages
ISBN : 9780141199795