Here is a book jot from July 2021:

I finished reading L’Assommoir (1877) by Emile Zola, translated by T. W. Tancock. It’s one of twenty books that make up his Les Rougon-Macquart series. These novels follow two lines of a French family living in the latter half of the 19th century.

L’Assommoir chronicles the lives of Gervaise, a laundress, and her husband and children. Their extended family and several neighbors are also prominent characters. Most of the story takes place in the space of just a few city blocks. Zola is excellent at descriptive prose and the streets and city become a character that seems to exert its own influence upon the characters’ lives.

While the book and its characters brim with life, a continually constricting spiral of alcohol, poverty, vice, and degradation increasingly overshadows everything else. Booze flows through the pages of the story like the Seine through the Paris suburbs of its setting. Even for Zola, this is a grim novel.

All of Gervaise’s children are protagonists in later novels, and this gives L’Assommoir a particular interest to readers curious about Zola’s fictional world. This world, so rich in setting and character, is one in which the reader can become deeply immersed.