a complex tale of labor and strife, told with efficiency . After "L'Assommoir" and "Nana," I was accustomed to Zola's "naturalist" style of reporting the details and constructing a story to make a point about Second Empire society. But "Germinal" surpasses those two, mainly due to Zola's efficiency. Middle-class readers in his day were likely to have invested more time than contemporary readers in reading (no search engines or video games in the late 19th century), so it's understandable why "Germinal" is so saturated with detail. That being noted, this is a masterfully written and passionate book that makes for fast reading. Zola is at his best evoking the coal elevator, the movements of an enraged crowd, the gossiping wives of miners, etc., giving the reader a clear description of the sights, sounds and smells of the moment.    A few reviewers have interpreted this is a tale of oppresive capitalism. While much of symbolism (the mine that eats the workers, the sufferings of Catherine and so on) could give that impression, this is story of disasterous ideology. Set in 1866-1867, when the Civil War in the U.S. exacerbated the coal industry's overcapitalization in France, Etienne falls in love with the proto-socialist movement (instead of Catherine) and sets off catastrophe. The episode in which Etienne, Chaval and Catherine wait underground for their rescuers is a potent metaphor for his relationship with the miners.      There are a number of very interesting characters in this book, who evolve to the decaying situations around them and often end up doing some very shocking things. Sprinkled with references to Darwin, "Germinal" features multiple characters that seems to revert to animal-like behavior. Whether Zola was not into economic progress as some suggest here is debatable, but there can be no mistake that he wanted to show the tremendous sacrifices that are involved. The change to the timbering rules by the company, the charge by the miners to Jean-Bart, and the act of sabotage by the Souvarine all have their disasterous unintended consequences. And it has been unintended consequences that defeated Marxism. In this way Zola was prophetic.    Chaval is mostly portrayed as a cruel man who represents the natural urges that Etienne constantly battles. A very good website by a professor at Washington State mentioned that "Chaval" resembles "cheval," which means "horse." So the practicality, beast-of-the-mines existence of Chaval is linked by name to the very sympathetic horses in this story. In this way Chaval is a fully-developed character in "Germinal."    Does this book have contemporary interpretations? During the week that I read this, there were two newspaper stories about coal mining. One in the weekend Milwaukee paper, told of a labor shortage in American coal mines, where in Pennsylvania and Ohio, veteran miners are returning to the towns they once had to leave. Soon afterward, the N.Y. Times described a tragic collapse in a coal mine in the central Henan province of China, showing a picture of thin, grey-clad family members crowding a building next to the entrance to the mine, waiting for names of the survivors and the still missing. Given the (capitalist) history of the U.S. and the (Communist) history of China, would Zola be surprised by the content of these two newspaper stories in 2004?     Coal mining in the U.S., of course, is a segment of the economy of which many environmentalists disapprove; its fate may be decided by the upcoming presidential election. Zola's "Germinal" is a masterpiece (I enjoyed the translation by Leonard Tanock), but its lessons may not be as simple as some readers may hope.
Output: POS