the effects of heredity and environment on one multi-branched family. Nana, needless to say, is from the bastard side, the Marcquarts.
Her fortunes follow wild gyrations, from gutter to chateau and back again. We see her first on stage, as the Blonde Venus; she can neither act nor sing, but her stage presence is awesome, at least in the nude. She rises to become the toast of the Parisian demi-monde, sinks to streetwalking. Always she is the sexual vulture, preying on the men of Paris—save only for one interlude of genuine passion, when she falls for an actor.
She is not the stereotypical prostitute with the heart of gold. But she is not unremittingly evil, either. She can yell and scream and cruelly taunt, yet in the next breath, seeing her victim suffer, coo him back to glad-heartedness.
Throughout Nana , grotesque contrasts abound—the glow of French society against the moral putrefaction underneath. No one exemplifies this better than Muffat, the Catholically upright count, enormously wealthy, chamberlain in the Emperor’s court, who is only too glad to be led around with a leash by Nana—toward novel’s end almost literally so. Indeed, virtually all the characters in Nana are obsessed in on way or another, some by the Church, some by gold, some by spectacle, most all by women’s flesh.
Nana has its defects. Among them is table conversation that sometimes drags interminably. And if one of the novel’s strengths is Zola’s raw view of the underside of French society, with all its vulgarity and seediness, that is its weakness, too—that no character is granted a noble sentiment, that all that seems fresh and pure, in all this sordidness, is Nana’s magnificent young body.
Ten Days that Shook the World
____________
By John Reed
First published in 1919
“My sympathies were not neutral,” John Reed admits in the preface to Ten Days That Shook the World , his firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In these pages, foes of the Bolsheviks emerge as stubborn impediments to the onrushing tide of history while Lenin, Trotsky and their proletarian partisans are held up as noble representatives of a higher humanity, aglow with a sense of historical mission.
Some critics at the time complained, as did the London Times , that Reed had “swallowed the Bolshevists' propaganda en bloc.” Yet others lauded him, in the words of one, for a “restraint which practically vacuum-cleans the book of any mere rhetorical passages.” Indeed, seen, then, against a swirl of contradictory contentions that the Bolshevik Revolution meant the Millennium, on the one hand, or the Apocalypse, on the other, John Reed's work can indeed be considered “restrained.” For while he made plain his sympathies, he was enough of a reporter to record facts, and to represent views at odds with his own.
The Harvard-educated Reed, in fact, was considered one of the crack reporters of his day. Fresh from chronicling the 1917 Mexican civil war, he went to Russia where, earlier that year, the czar had been overthrown and a provisional government under moderate socialist Kerensky installed. All the while, the Great War raged. While its armies suffered in the trenches and food ran short in its cities, Russia trembled with the choice of just what sort of a revolution it wanted, teetering this way or that with each report from the front or shift in the bread supply.
A tactical dispute as early as 1903 had split Marxists into two factions--the Mensheviks, or minority wing, and the more radical Bolsheviks, or majority. Now, 14 years later, these groups, along with a confusing welter of other parties, struggled for power in the streets and assembly halls of Petrograd and Moscow. Reed was there, to record it.
The scene: The Petrograd Soviet, the hub of revolutionary ferment, following the overthrow of the Provisional Government. It “was tenser than ever...The same running men in the dark corridors, squads of workers with rifles, leaders
Her fortunes follow wild gyrations, from gutter to chateau and back again. We see her first on stage, as the Blonde Venus; she can neither act nor sing, but her stage presence is awesome, at least in the nude. She rises to become the toast of the Parisian demi-monde, sinks to streetwalking. Always she is the sexual vulture, preying on the men of Paris—save only for one interlude of genuine passion, when she falls for an actor.
She is not the stereotypical prostitute with the heart of gold. But she is not unremittingly evil, either. She can yell and scream and cruelly taunt, yet in the next breath, seeing her victim suffer, coo him back to glad-heartedness.
Throughout Nana , grotesque contrasts abound—the glow of French society against the moral putrefaction underneath. No one exemplifies this better than Muffat, the Catholically upright count, enormously wealthy, chamberlain in the Emperor’s court, who is only too glad to be led around with a leash by Nana—toward novel’s end almost literally so. Indeed, virtually all the characters in Nana are obsessed in on way or another, some by the Church, some by gold, some by spectacle, most all by women’s flesh.
Nana has its defects. Among them is table conversation that sometimes drags interminably. And if one of the novel’s strengths is Zola’s raw view of the underside of French society, with all its vulgarity and seediness, that is its weakness, too—that no character is granted a noble sentiment, that all that seems fresh and pure, in all this sordidness, is Nana’s magnificent young body.
Ten Days that Shook the World
____________
By John Reed
First published in 1919
“My sympathies were not neutral,” John Reed admits in the preface to Ten Days That Shook the World , his firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In these pages, foes of the Bolsheviks emerge as stubborn impediments to the onrushing tide of history while Lenin, Trotsky and their proletarian partisans are held up as noble representatives of a higher humanity, aglow with a sense of historical mission.
Some critics at the time complained, as did the London Times , that Reed had “swallowed the Bolshevists' propaganda en bloc.” Yet others lauded him, in the words of one, for a “restraint which practically vacuum-cleans the book of any mere rhetorical passages.” Indeed, seen, then, against a swirl of contradictory contentions that the Bolshevik Revolution meant the Millennium, on the one hand, or the Apocalypse, on the other, John Reed's work can indeed be considered “restrained.” For while he made plain his sympathies, he was enough of a reporter to record facts, and to represent views at odds with his own.
The Harvard-educated Reed, in fact, was considered one of the crack reporters of his day. Fresh from chronicling the 1917 Mexican civil war, he went to Russia where, earlier that year, the czar had been overthrown and a provisional government under moderate socialist Kerensky installed. All the while, the Great War raged. While its armies suffered in the trenches and food ran short in its cities, Russia trembled with the choice of just what sort of a revolution it wanted, teetering this way or that with each report from the front or shift in the bread supply.
A tactical dispute as early as 1903 had split Marxists into two factions--the Mensheviks, or minority wing, and the more radical Bolsheviks, or majority. Now, 14 years later, these groups, along with a confusing welter of other parties, struggled for power in the streets and assembly halls of Petrograd and Moscow. Reed was there, to record it.
The scene: The Petrograd Soviet, the hub of revolutionary ferment, following the overthrow of the Provisional Government. It “was tenser than ever...The same running men in the dark corridors, squads of workers with rifles, leaders
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