King goes for The Double by George Pelecanos, Headhunters by Jo Nesbo (he calls it hilarious and creepy too), and, intriguingly, Germinal by Émile Zola, a terrific novel of a labor strike, as fresh now as it was a hundred years ago, he says. -- Germinal is inundated with epic, overlapping themes of conflict. Zola spends a lot of time detailing the depravity of life which exists in severe poverty by painting it as promiscuous and base. It is the rise of industrialist capitalism that is truly base and animalistically cruel, and I think that Zola doesnt get this point across effectively, if problematically, by having the poor workers of his story act relentlessly lascivious. It’s a brutal, unhappy story, abrasively told. It’s political, but, alas, very simplistic: each character, whether central or peripheral to the plot, whether involved in the strike or opposing it, appears to make mistakes according to their own lines of reasoning and at some point mirrors the hypocrisy of their antagonist. Flaws of ideology, behaviour, methodology, abound on all sides of the struggle. The book is too dense, and rather very naturalistic than realistic.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 11:15:28 +0000
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