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1arubabookwoman
Here is my short review of The Belly of Paris:
This third in the Rougon-Macquart novels focuses on the people of Las Halles, a huge market in Paris for vegetables, fish, flowers, fowl, and just about anything else. Florent, a former revolutionary, has escaped from Devil's Island. He returns to Paris to live with his brother and sister-in-law above their butcher shop, posing as his sister-in-law's cousin. He obtains a position as a fish inspector in Las Halles. His sister-in-law, however, resents him, because she knows he is owed a share of the inheritance with which they bought the butcher's shop, and because she fears the consequences to herself and her husband if it is discovered they are harboring an escaped convict.
The 'star' of the novel is Las Halles itself, and its many denizens. Zola's descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of the flowers and fish, the geese and the cabbages, and all the other marvels of this huge market are unforgettable. The name-calling and rivalry among the fish-wives, the haggling with the vegetable woman, the neighborhood gossips, the children who are born and grow up in the market--all of these create a vivid and fascinating slice of life as it existed in a small section of Paris during the mid-19th century.
This third in the Rougon-Macquart novels focuses on the people of Las Halles, a huge market in Paris for vegetables, fish, flowers, fowl, and just about anything else. Florent, a former revolutionary, has escaped from Devil's Island. He returns to Paris to live with his brother and sister-in-law above their butcher shop, posing as his sister-in-law's cousin. He obtains a position as a fish inspector in Las Halles. His sister-in-law, however, resents him, because she knows he is owed a share of the inheritance with which they bought the butcher's shop, and because she fears the consequences to herself and her husband if it is discovered they are harboring an escaped convict.
The 'star' of the novel is Las Halles itself, and its many denizens. Zola's descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of the flowers and fish, the geese and the cabbages, and all the other marvels of this huge market are unforgettable. The name-calling and rivalry among the fish-wives, the haggling with the vegetable woman, the neighborhood gossips, the children who are born and grow up in the market--all of these create a vivid and fascinating slice of life as it existed in a small section of Paris during the mid-19th century.
2rebeccanyc
Looking forward to this one!
3slickdpdx
Finally started Belly. I never thought I would type the following: Like you said, incredible descriptions of vegetables! He paints them (and the rest) to rival Paul Cezanne or is it Claude Lantier...
4lriley
If I remember correctly The belly of Paris was the third in the series. To me it's the book in the Rougon MacQuart series where Zola really hits his stride as a novelist. Great book.
5rebeccanyc
It's the third Zola wrote, but it's the 11th in the recommended reading order on this Wikipedia page, so I haven't gotten to it yet.
6slickdpdx
As good as the descriptions of the markets - Zola's portrayals of the pyschology of the ladies of the market and the members of the group meeting at LeBigre's.
7rebeccanyc
Here's my review of The Belly of Paris.
Food -- piles and piles and displays and displays of meats, chickens, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, salted items, and more -- are the stars of this novel by Zola, which only peripherally involves members of the Rougon-Macquart family: Lisa Quenu, the sister of the unforgettable Gervaise of L'assommoir, and Claude Lantier, an artist who is one of Gervaise's children and who will be the protagonist of The Masterpiece. The protagonist of this novel is Florent Quenu, half-brother of Lisa's husband, has managed to find his way home to Paris after being deported to Devil's Island based on a trumped-up arrest following the coup that initiated the Second Empire in 1851; he is brought to Les Halles on the last leg of his journey by a farming woman taking her vegetables to market who picked him up when he was lying half-dead from exhaustion and hunger by the edge of the road. However, his story (including the back story of his childhood, arrest, and imprisonment) is almost secondary to the descriptions of the foods and operations of the recently opened Les Halles, which stands as a symbol of both bourgeois plenty and decay.
To give the flavor (sorry!) of this:
"All around them the cheeses were stinking. On the two shelves of the back of the stall were huge blocks of butter: Brittany butter overflowing its baskets; Normandy butter wrapped in cloth, looking like models of bellies on to which a sculptor had thrown some wet rags; other blocks, already cut into and looking like high rocks full of valleys and crevices. . . . But for the most part the cheeses stood in piles on the table. There, next to the one pound packs of butter, a gigantic cantal was spread on leaves of white beet, as though split by blows from an axe; then came a golden Cheshire cheese, a gruyere like a wheel falling from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and as hard as skulls -- which has earned them the name of 'death's heads'. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others. Three bries, on round boards, looked like melancholy moons. p. 210
And so on, for another page!
Florent is appalled by the richness and selfishness of his brother and sister-in-law, and of the charcuterie which they run; he refuses his share of an inheritance, but nevertheless stays with them. Soon, he is persuaded, despite reservations, to take over the job of fish inspector in Les Halles, falls in with some would-be revolutionaries, is the subject of intensive gossip and spying by a slew of local women, spends some time with the painter Claude Lantier and with the farmer who brought him to Paris, and needless to say gets into additional trouble.
But the real subject of the novel is the bourgeois consumer excesses and self-satisfaction of the Second Empire, as symbolized by all the food, in contrast to the the poor, the thin, the revolutionaries, the artists, the farmers, and two teenagers who grew up roaming around Les Halles and making it their home. As Lisa, who prides herself on her respectability, above all, thinks at one point, after hearing Florent talk about going without food for three or more days in the course of his escape:
"But the scornful pout of her lips and her straight unflinching gaze clearly implied that in opinion only a scoundrel could ever go without food in this ill-regulated fashion. A man capable of living without food for three days struck her as a highly dangerous character. Respectable people never put themselves in that position. p. 85
Furthermore, this novel is full of blood and fat: the blood when animals are slaughtered and when the Quenu charcuterie makes blood sausage; the fat of all the foods in the charcuterie and on the financially successful shop owners. Lisa and her peers take pride in their fatness as a sign of their success, and are suspicious of Florent's thinness; Claude Lantier explicitly discusses the conflict between the Fat and the Thin.
The other main aspect of this novel is the level of gossip and spying that goes on. Zola introduces the reader to several different families and individuals who are involved in some way in the business of Les Halles, and many of them seem to be diligently spying on each other and then spreading malicious gossip to cause people to fall out with each other. One woman in particular, Mademoiselle Saget, is a master of this, and also lives high up in a building so that she can see from her window everyone who goes by and what they're doing. Of course, there are "real" spies too, informers for the police.
This was Zola's third Rougon-Macquart novel, and the first in which he made use of the kind of research into the details of an environment or an activity that make some of his other novels so stunning. (I read it now because I'm more or less following the reading order suggested by Zola according to this Wikipedia page.) It paints an unforgettable portrait of the workings of Les Halles (the food and the people), while at the same time criticizing the bourgeois contentment of the Second Empire that made people close their eyes to injustice and economic struggle.
Food -- piles and piles and displays and displays of meats, chickens, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, salted items, and more -- are the stars of this novel by Zola, which only peripherally involves members of the Rougon-Macquart family: Lisa Quenu, the sister of the unforgettable Gervaise of L'assommoir, and Claude Lantier, an artist who is one of Gervaise's children and who will be the protagonist of The Masterpiece. The protagonist of this novel is Florent Quenu, half-brother of Lisa's husband, has managed to find his way home to Paris after being deported to Devil's Island based on a trumped-up arrest following the coup that initiated the Second Empire in 1851; he is brought to Les Halles on the last leg of his journey by a farming woman taking her vegetables to market who picked him up when he was lying half-dead from exhaustion and hunger by the edge of the road. However, his story (including the back story of his childhood, arrest, and imprisonment) is almost secondary to the descriptions of the foods and operations of the recently opened Les Halles, which stands as a symbol of both bourgeois plenty and decay.
To give the flavor (sorry!) of this:
"All around them the cheeses were stinking. On the two shelves of the back of the stall were huge blocks of butter: Brittany butter overflowing its baskets; Normandy butter wrapped in cloth, looking like models of bellies on to which a sculptor had thrown some wet rags; other blocks, already cut into and looking like high rocks full of valleys and crevices. . . . But for the most part the cheeses stood in piles on the table. There, next to the one pound packs of butter, a gigantic cantal was spread on leaves of white beet, as though split by blows from an axe; then came a golden Cheshire cheese, a gruyere like a wheel falling from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and as hard as skulls -- which has earned them the name of 'death's heads'. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others. Three bries, on round boards, looked like melancholy moons. p. 210
And so on, for another page!
Florent is appalled by the richness and selfishness of his brother and sister-in-law, and of the charcuterie which they run; he refuses his share of an inheritance, but nevertheless stays with them. Soon, he is persuaded, despite reservations, to take over the job of fish inspector in Les Halles, falls in with some would-be revolutionaries, is the subject of intensive gossip and spying by a slew of local women, spends some time with the painter Claude Lantier and with the farmer who brought him to Paris, and needless to say gets into additional trouble.
But the real subject of the novel is the bourgeois consumer excesses and self-satisfaction of the Second Empire, as symbolized by all the food, in contrast to the the poor, the thin, the revolutionaries, the artists, the farmers, and two teenagers who grew up roaming around Les Halles and making it their home. As Lisa, who prides herself on her respectability, above all, thinks at one point, after hearing Florent talk about going without food for three or more days in the course of his escape:
"But the scornful pout of her lips and her straight unflinching gaze clearly implied that in opinion only a scoundrel could ever go without food in this ill-regulated fashion. A man capable of living without food for three days struck her as a highly dangerous character. Respectable people never put themselves in that position. p. 85
Furthermore, this novel is full of blood and fat: the blood when animals are slaughtered and when the Quenu charcuterie makes blood sausage; the fat of all the foods in the charcuterie and on the financially successful shop owners. Lisa and her peers take pride in their fatness as a sign of their success, and are suspicious of Florent's thinness; Claude Lantier explicitly discusses the conflict between the Fat and the Thin.
The other main aspect of this novel is the level of gossip and spying that goes on. Zola introduces the reader to several different families and individuals who are involved in some way in the business of Les Halles, and many of them seem to be diligently spying on each other and then spreading malicious gossip to cause people to fall out with each other. One woman in particular, Mademoiselle Saget, is a master of this, and also lives high up in a building so that she can see from her window everyone who goes by and what they're doing. Of course, there are "real" spies too, informers for the police.
This was Zola's third Rougon-Macquart novel, and the first in which he made use of the kind of research into the details of an environment or an activity that make some of his other novels so stunning. (I read it now because I'm more or less following the reading order suggested by Zola according to this Wikipedia page.) It paints an unforgettable portrait of the workings of Les Halles (the food and the people), while at the same time criticizing the bourgeois contentment of the Second Empire that made people close their eyes to injustice and economic struggle.
9slickdpdx
What was up with the guy that Lisa made into an idiot? Seemed like a weird plot. Some correspondence to Florent? I don't think there is but its all I can think of.
10rebeccanyc
Not at home so can't look up his name, but I'm sure he and the girl who grew up together as waifs in Les Halles are there to represent the natural human instincts for freedom and sex that are suppressed by the bourgeois desires for money and material goods and "respectability." In that, respect, he and she are comparable to Florent and Claude (the "thin" as opposed to the "fat"). When Lisa pushes him because he is making advances to her and he falls and hits his head, she is just behaving as she always has: coldly and calculatedly doing whatever she needs to do to preserve her place in society and her "respectability." At least that's how I see it.
11slickdpdx
Thanks for your thoughts! I agree about the general type of the two waifs (not waives!), but I am still a bit puzzled by the post head injury story line.
12rebeccanyc
Somehow I seem to have forgotten what happened to him post-head-injury (weird memory!). Will check when I get back home.
