La Bete Humaine (Classics) - Softcover

La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.

Emile Zola, born in 1840, was the founder of the Naturalist movement in French literature. His novel Thérèse Raquin caused a scandal on publication and was followed by his brilliant Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), a series of twenty novels focussed on one family. Zola died in mysterious circumstances in 1902, the victim of an accident or murder.