num_pages: 300
description: Here is a true publishing event–the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction’s giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola’s The Kill (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author’s twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée’s financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and “the capital of the nineteenth century.” In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman’s spirit and a city’s soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world’s premier translators from the French, The Kill contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by “infernal intelligence.”In this new incarnation, The Kill joins Nana and Germinal on the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who–explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting–always goes in for the kill.
language: English
title: The Kill
titlecomplete: The Kill
characters: Laure de Aurigny, Baroness of Meinhold, Madame de Lauwerens, Madame Teissière, Madame Daste, Madame Michelin, Pasha Selim, Monsieur Haffner, Duchess de Rozan, Madame de Guende, Monsieur Béraud du Châtel, Countess Vanska, Monsieur de Saffré, Baron Gouraud, Duchess of Sternich, Count de Chibray
genres: Historical Fiction, French Literature, Novels, Literature, Roman, Classic Literature, Classics, Fiction, 19th Century, France
ratings_count: 5089
series: Les Rougon-Macquart
publisher: Modern Library