L'assommoir

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877), is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives. This book is a powerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions, and the Introduction examines its relation to politics and art as well as its explosive effect on the literary scene.

Emile Zola was a French novelist, part of the literary school of Naturalism, and a force in the political liberalization of France. Half of Zola's novels were a set of twenty called Les Rougon-Macquart, set in France's Second Empire. It traces two branches of a single family. Said Zola, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."

"L'Assomir" tells the story of Gervaise Macquart. In Paris working as a laundress, she is abandoned with her young sons by her lover, Lantir. She marries a roofing engineer named Coupeau, saves enough money to open her own laundry and bears a daughter named Nana. But a fall from a roof badly injures Coupeau, and he takes to drink during his recovery. Lantier returns, Gervais suffers reverses including losing her shop, and joins Coupeau in a downward spiral of drink.