Truth

By Émile Zola, Zola, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Book Overview

In a quiet rural village in late 19th-century France, an eleven-year-old boy is found dead in his room, sexually molested and strangled by an unknown assailant. The shocked townsfolk erupt in outrage: Who could have committed this horrible crime? Rumors immediately begin to fly and suspicions shift from one person to another as ignorant conjecture begins to feed on itself.At first a vagrant is suspected; he could have come in through the open window while passing through the town at night. But in a matter of days another story begins to circulate: the culprit must be Simon, the Jewish schoolmaster, and the murdered boy's uncle and guardian. Did he not, it is rumored, resent the fact that the boy was the product of a mixed Catholic-Jewish marriage and was raised Catholic by his now deceased mother? Despite the total lack of evidence against him, as a Jew in the midst of a predominantly Christian community, Simon is completely vulnerable to these vicious allegations. The web of mendacity that is quickly spun around him is the product of centuries of entrenched anti-Semitism and the long-standing bitter rivalry between the Catholic majority of the town and an emerging secular minority. Through political pressure by influential Catholic clergymen and the manipulation of public opinion, the Church deftly deflects the suspicions of some that the murderer is actually one of the Christian Brothers and succeeds in gaining advantage against the threat of encroaching secularism in the town.Based on his experiences with the infamous Dreyfus case, this powerful last novel by Emile Zola about the scape-goating of a Jewish schoolteacher is a chilling depiction of anti-Semitism fully embedded in European society and an eerie presentiment of the Holocaust that would sweep across the Continent only forty years later. But this is not the whole story, for Zola also brilliantly demonstrates how truth, though suppressed for a generation, slowly but inexorably comes to light through the dedication and perseverance of a few humble defenders, who remain unswerving in their demand for justice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573929387
• ISBN13: 9781573929387
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 618 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A great last novel from a great author.

TRUTH is Emile Zola's last novel and was published after his death. It is his longest book and deals with the transformative power of Truth, Justice, and Love. It also deals with how social change happens slowly through generational change rather than by changingthe minds of individuals. It is the story of a teacher in a small French town fighting to prove the innocence of his fellow teacher, a Jew, who is accused of killing a child. The defenders of the teacher have to fight anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church, the government, and the press. Written after Zola's return from exile in England for his part in the Dreyfus Affair, the book draws much of its plot from his experiences fighting anti-Semitism. It is a powerful work that shows how anti-Semitism was used by the different factions in 19th CenturyFrance for their own ends. This is Zola's third anti-clerical work and his strongest. The first two are LOURDES and ROME which deal with a priest's growing disillusion with his church. In TRUTH, the teacher knows that the real murderer is a Christian brother in the local Catholic school who is protected by the local priests. He has to expose the corruption in the church to prove the innocence of his friend. This plot has special relevance to Americans today who are struggling with stories of priests who molested young boys and a Catholic church that protected the priests rather than the children. In the preface written a hundred years ago, the translator states that this abuse by a cleric of a young boy "is not to be regarded as altogether exceptional" since many such crimes are hushed up by friends in the church. The structure of the novel is well thought out and is composed of four books of four chapters each. Although narrated in the third person, the book is mostly told from the point of view of the teacher. This lack of objectivity is the weakest part of the novel because we only get to see the teacher's opponents through his limited and biased view. The book is Utopian in style with Truth conquering deceit and leading to a more perfect social structure.