Coupeau was just crossing the street. He nearly smashed a pane of glass as he staggered through the door. He was dead drunk, his teeth clenched, his nose pinched. Gervaise could see at once the poison from Père Colombe's Assommoir in the polluted blood that discoloured his skin. She wanted to laugh it off and put him to bed, as she always did when he was lit up by wine. But he pushed her aside without opening his mouth and raised his fist as he brushed past and dropped on to the bed. He was just like the other one, the drunkard snoring upstairs, worn out with beating his wife. A chill came over Gervaise as, with a sinking heart, she thought about the men in her life, about her husband and Goujet and Lantier, and despaired of ever being happy.

Robin Buss's translation renders Zola's street argot into clear, contemporary English. This edition also includes an introduction discussing Zola's Naturalistic method, with maps of Paris, Zola's preface responding to his critics, notes, a chronology and further reading. Set in the taverns of Paris, this is perhaps the first classical tragedy of working-class people living in the slums of a city. The Drinking Den (1877) is part of the Rougon-Macquart series, a naturalistic history of two branches of a family traced through several generations. Zola's work was influenced by contemporary theories of heredity and experimental science, and the behaviour of the two families is shown to be conditioned by environment and inherited characteristics, chiefly drunkenness and mental instability. Read more Detailsimportant exporter of dairy produce. Language: Danish. Religion: Christian, Lutheran majority. Currency: krone. Capital: Copenhagen. Pop: 5 733 551 (2017 est). Area: 43 031 sq km (16 614 sq miles) Si se está familiarizado con el naturalismo (que fue un movimiento instaurado por el autor), se sabe que sus obras retratan lo más real posible el cómo se vive en un sector de la sociedad, en este caso la clase trabajadora, quien día con día debe mantenerse a flote en un mundo que le ha dado la espalda. Si bien esto ocurría en el París del siglo XIX, fácilmente podría darse en cualquier lugar, en cualquier momento de la historia, y por supuesto que también en la actualidad. Zola has an absolutely mesmerizing way of unfolding the vignette that is Gevaise's existence. He describes surroundings, characters, clothing, animals, nothing is left undisturbed. No Gervaise non è ambiziosa ma il destino ha forse scritto parole differenti per la giovane lavandaia. In a description that apes later British Railway’s catering, railway food before Spiers and Pond were described as “the scalding infusion, satirically called tea, the stale bad buns, with their veneering of furniture polish, the sawdusty sandwiches, so frequently and so energetically condemned, and, more so than all, the icy stare from the counter, the insolent ignoring of every customer’s existence, which drives the hungry frantic,”

A writer in All The Year Round of December 1867 praised the “modern magicians”, who had ended an abuse “under which the British railway traveller had groaned ever since railways were”. This book was number seventh in a series of twenty books that Zola wrote describing the lives of Parisians in the 1800s. For me it was a tough read (except for the food scenes). One could see how tough their circumstances were. In some ways, they wanted to emulate those with money but often there abilities were limited, or like this couple, debt crippled them. Ah sadly, not much has changed. And of course the big revelation is that their daughter Nana becomes a dancer in the famed, and naughty Folies show. She dumps her cruel parents for her new life entertaining men. This follows in the famous Zola book, Nana.Her children will take their childhood with them into their respective adult lives, and they will be marked by their mother's struggle for a spot to call her own.