Nana

We first meet Nana as the lead in an operetta at the Théâtre des Variétés. Everyone in Paris is talking about her, and we see right away that though Nana cannot act or sing, there is something about Nana that draws men to her. In every case, the men drawn to her lose everything in their attempts to keep her for themselves. As the novel continues, Nana goes from being a street prostitute to a high-priced call girl supported by rich men, by men of position and power. But Nana is easily bored, and she runs through the money of a man and discards him. Eventually she brings many men to ruin, and she ends up dying a horrible death.

Nana, like many women I have known, depends on her beauty and sex appeal to get along in life. She treats people like objects to be bought and thrown away; Nana is truly an awful human being.

I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. I was happiest reading the last pages in which Nana's corpse is gruesomely described, and even then I couldn't really take satisfaction in seeing a terrible end for this woman who was treated so badly as a child and as a young woman and who was never really loved for herself.

Nana is a picture of a world I have never visited before, a world I would rather not visit again, a world I wish did not exist.

“Great depravity leads to great piety.”

Such an entertaining read. How can you not like this book? Sure, its misogyny is over-the-top, but the male characters don't look so great, either.

Toward the end of the book are the inklings of the excess and “perversion” of the Decadent movement to come in France a few years later:

“Woman dominated him with the jealous tyranny of a God of wrath, terrifying him but granting him moments of joy as keen as spasms, in return for hours of hideous torments, visions of hell and eternal tortures. He stammered out the same despairing prayers as in church, and above all suffered the same fits of humility peculiar to an accursed creature crushed under the mud from which he has sprung.”

(Ugh, don't you hate it when that happens?!)

I bought this a little over a year ago in a bookshop where somehow every customer/employee had already read it. This led to a deep dive internet intro to Zola and the Rougon Macquart series. I ended up reading a couple other Zola books before getting to this one and really liked them. Overall, I liked Nana but not as much as I liked Germinale and L'assommoir. I think it also may have been overhyped in my head from the bookshop intro. Still good, still liked it, just didn't love it.