Germinal
by Emilé Zola
★★★★☆
From here on out there are spoilers. I'd recommend
skipping the review if you haven't read it.
Étienne Lantier arrives in a French town looking for
work. Soon he's down in the depths of the earth mining for coal. He becomes
friends with a man named Maheu who is a hard worker and well-respected in the mine. The
working conditions are atrocious and there's barely enough pay for
workers to scrap by. Grumblings start to increase among the workers and eventually
they decide to go to their boss to ask for higher compensation and a few small
things.
Maheu is chosen to speak for everyone and he does so in a
calm and dignified way. When their request is casually rejected the situation
inevitably escalates. The decide to strike and a mob forms and they travel
through the countryside in a whirlwind of destruction. The mob mentality makes the
workers willing to do things they would never normally do, Things spiral out of control as the
mob continues to progress. Even Étienne who wants to protect the pump at the
beginning, later wants to destroy it in his frustration. It culminates in the death of a man named
Negrel when he falls from a roof while trying to escape the mob. The
women gruesomely mutilate his corpse as the police arrive.
"It was the red vision of the revolution, which
would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end
of the century."
Maheu's daughter Catherine's story really struck a chord
with me. She is raped by a man named Chaval, but because of the way their
culture views women, she basically just becomes his property. He's brutal and
jealous and she believes she has no other choice, even though Étienne loves her.
In the final third of the novel there is a collapse at
the mine and workers, including Étienne, Catherine, and Chaval, are trapped
underground. The scenes are harrowing as we read about their loved ones
reactions above ground, but once we descend into the pits it's so much worse. I loved that after all the turmoil the workers still wanted to rescue their fellow miners.
"All the colliers rushed to offer themselves in an
upsurge of brotherhood and solidarity. They forgot the strike, they did not
trouble themselves at all about payment; they might get nothing, they only
asked to risk their lives as soon as comrades lives were in danger."
There was one scene that chronicles the mad dash of a
work horse that still haunts me. The animal, Bataille, is desperately
trying to find his way out, but in his fearful galloping he becomes trapped as
water rises. It was awful to read.
"It was a sight of fearful agony, this old beast
shattered and motionless, struggling at this depth, far from the daylight. The
flood was drowning his mane, and his cry of distress never ceased; he uttered
it more hoarsely, with his large open mouth stretched out."
Another memorable scene took place above ground. The
Gregorie family owns the mine. Circumstances lead them to visit one of the
miner's homes with a few gifts and during the visit Cécile, the adult daughter, is strangled to
death by one of the old workers, Bonnemort. That summery doesn't do the scene
justice. The eerie calm as the two people looked at each other before the
violence begins, the screams of her mother when she realizes what happened;
it's heartbreaking. No one seems to leave this novel completely unscathed.
BOTTOM LINE: I was expecting a boring book with political rants about social injustice. Instead I found the gripping story of a group of people mired in an impossible situation. They are desperate and in those dire moments they are capable of the unthinkable. Just a fantastic read.
"He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to
suffer and to struggle; and he thought angrily of those 'people' Bonnemort had
told him about, and of the squat and sated deity to whom ten thousand starving
men and women daily offered up their flesh without ever knowing who or what
this god might be."
Thanks for reading along my fellow #GerminalAlong folks! And thanks to Care's Books and Pie for hosting with me and sending out awesome postcards!
