Nana (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

'Douglas Parmée's translation of Nana is another thoroughly researched and highly crafted job which has caught the raciness of the original. It has a substantial Introduction which evokes in fine detail the flashy, pleasure-loving society of the Second Empire.'Joy Newton, University of Glasgow, French Studies, Vol. 47, Part 3

'Three Classic tales of sexual passion, perversion, and corruption have been added to the rapidly increasing World's Classics collection, whose repertoire of nineteenth-century French novels is now impressive. The price and format of these volumes make them an obvious choice for the reader approaching them in translation, the more so since each is accompanied by a helpful general introduction ... the reader is likely to get better vaqlue here than from other translation currently in print.'Timothy Unwin, University of Western Australia, MLR, 89./2, 1994

Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siècle moral corruption. The fate of Nana, the Helen of Troy of the Second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir, reduced Flaubert to almost inarticulate gasps of admiration: `Chapter 14, unsurpassable! ... Yes! ... Christ Almighty! ... Incomparable ... Straight out of Babylon!'

Boulevard society is presented with painstaking attention to detail, and Zola's documentation of the contemporary theatrical scene comes directly from his own experience - it was his own failure as a playwright which sent him back to novel-writing and Nana itself.

This new translation is an accurate and stylish rendering of Zola's original, which was first published in 1880.
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