Didn’t plan to read another Zola, but finished no.356 unexpectedly in bed and needed something else to read.
Zola is a terribly prolix writer, and there are far too many poorly differentiated characters in this book.
The basic premise is simple and amusing: Nana is a totally cynical working girl, who fucks for money and climbs economically and in a quasi-social way – the high class prostitutes are in a parallel social world to the upper class.
Much of the book is very hard work, but I loved chapter 5 where two groups of Parisians head off into the country and occupy 2 country houses, one of which is respectable, the other less so and characters troupe from one to another. It is quite Jane Austen-ish.
Zola regards her perhaps as ‘The fly that had flown up from the ordure of the slums, bringing with it the leaven of social rottenness [who] had poisoned all these men merely by alighting on them’.
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