L’Assommoir

“I wanted to depict the inevitable downfall of the working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas.” So Zola wrote of L’Assommoir which some critics rate as the greatest of his Rougon-Macquart novels. Perhaps the first ‘classical tragedy’ of working-class people living in the slums of a city, the writing is vivid and without romantic illusion. Zola uses the coarse argot of the back-streets of Paris to plot the descent of the easy-going Gervaise through idleness, drunkenness, promiscuity, filth and starvation.

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