L’Assommoir
Gervaise Macquart, a lame young laundress abandoned by her lover, tries to build a decent life in the slums of working-class Paris. For a while she succeeds, opening her own shop and finding modest happiness, but drink, debt, and the pressures of poverty close in from every side, and the neighborhood grog shop that gives the book its name drags her family down by degrees. The seventh novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, it caused a scandal with its unflinching picture of alcoholism and hardship and its raw use of working-class speech. Pitiless yet deeply compassionate, it is one of the great novels of the industrial city. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.
About the Author
Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and the leading figure of literary naturalism. His twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle traced one family under the Second Empire, and his open letter J’accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus reshaped the writer’s role in public life.
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