Pot-Bouille (Everyman's Library) Review

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Pot-Bouille (Everyman's Library) ReviewZola's literary terrain was the victim with no voice, the laborers, those that made civilization run at great human cost. In "Pot- Bouille", (Boiling Pot), Zola has taken on the middle class residents of an apartment building and savages their collective pretensions of moral superiority. The stink of petty economies, money lust and aristocratic yearing is everywhere. His hero is Octave Mouret a young cloth merchant from the provinces who comes to 1860s Paris to make his fortune. In this residential building whose public areas are overdone with architectural garnish Mouret makes his home among an unhealthy bunch of souls. There are voracious mothers trying to marry off lackluster, shallow daughters, philandering husbands, besieged, toiling husbands, cold indifferent wives, callous mistresses. The servants are stored away for the night in their garret rooms after a day of being subjected to the customary regimen of abuse and bullying dished up by their employers. That the servants are a crude, ignorant crowd makes them no more worthy of respect than their masters. In the parallel world of house help slop bucket throwing, vulgar gossip, same sex seduction and infant death figures prominently. On the quest to conquer big, bad Paris Mouret helps himself heartily to all this messy stew offers whether neighbors' wives or solitary widows. He tastes whatever his manipulations bring his way. Women are a banquet fit for the taking if they can be emotionally and physically overpowered, so says the masculine imperative of the times. But then the female characters here have little to admire. The women represent a menu of every sort of female vice, wallowing in vanity, indolence and self-complacency served up in heaping portions. There is so much tragedy in this house that the horrors of greed and duplicity become almost farcical in Zola's hands. On these pages we live through a years worth of Jerry Springer moments top hats and crinoline hoop skirts flying in contentious free-for-all. "Pot- Bouille" is a feast of poisonous family values to be savored comfortably by the modern reader from the vantage point of a new (more humanist?) millennium.Pot-Bouille (Everyman's Library) OverviewRegarded as one of the best novels of the 19th century, "Pot-Bouille" strips away the facades of middle-class life and hypocrisy in a manner which outraged contemporary France, inciting scandal and court cases. This study edition contains both the text and a commentary upon it.

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