Germinal: Large Print

By: Zola, ?mile

The novel's central character is tienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller La B te humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Germinal persuaded him otherwise. The young migrant worker arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, tienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. tienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a na ve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as tienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Zola keeps his theorizing in the background and tienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political migr who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. tienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silv re in the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon (1871).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B086BK3RP2
• ISBN13: 9798628117620
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.5" x 11.0"