Émile Zola

Rita Schober

Nana.

Nana

Sarah Escorsa

Un de mes romans de Zola préférés, lu plusieurs fois depuis l'adolescence.

Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics)

Jeni Enjaian

I did not enjoy this book at all. I found it to be disgusting and completely pointless. Perhaps some of its supposed appeal is lost in translation but I am highly skeptical of that. The characters are almost completely ill-defined except for their depraved sexuality. Zola does nothing to make the reader care one whit about the title character. The only reason that I finished this book was because I had already gotten 100 pages in before the depravity because almost intolerable. I skimmed the remainder of the book.
It goes without saying (but I still will say it) that I do not recommend this book at all.

"Nana is probably the most famous character in Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel that bears her name, published in 1880, is the ninth volume in the series. It consists of a number of episodes, or tableaux, in the short but spectacular life of Ana Coupeau, the fourth child of Gervaise Macquart. We first saw her as a young girl in L'Assommoir (1877), her father an abusive alcoholic, her mother Gervaise reduced to a similar degraded state. She works as a milliner's assistant and dabbles in casual street prostitution. She has a child by an unknown father when she is sixteen. Having escaped from the slums, in Nana she makes her mark first in the theatre, then enters the world of high prostitution, becoming the most celebrated courtesan in Second Empire Paris, wreaking havoc among the upper classes with her rampant sexuality"--

Nana.

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