Earth by Emile Zola

Earth

by Emile Zola

Elek Books, 1956, [Fourth Impression], hardcover

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, previous owners stamp on front endpaper, foxing to endpapers, front endpaper and page 215 starting to separate from text block  (see photographs)

“With extreme realism it depicts the earthy life of the French peasant at the end of the Nineteenth Century.  But it is more than a naked and unashamed picture of the peasant’s absorption in his land, in all its processes of fertility and growth; it has also the elements of intense poetry and even rollicking humour, which has been so often ignored in the controversies over Zola’s ‘coarseness’ and ‘crudity’.
The magnificently sustained picture is achieved by a finely differentiated gallery of family portraits.  A subtle insight runs side by side with the realistic details; and the fierce struggles of the earth are fused with the inner struggles of the family which is at once a coherent organism and a mass of warring individuals”.