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The Beast Within (Penguin Classics)
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MSRP: $14.00
Your Price: $11.90
Savings: $ 2.10 ( 15% )
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
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Additional The Beast Within (Penguin Classics) Information
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A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master Émile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This new translation finally captures his fast- paced yet deliberately dispassionate style. Set at the end of the Second Empire, when French society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new railways and locomotives it was building, The Beast Within is at once a tale of murder, passion, and possession and a compassionate study of individuals derailed by the burden of inherited evil. In it, Zola expresses the hope that human nature evolves through education but warns that the beast within continues to lurk beneath the veneer of technological progress.
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What Customers Say About The Beast Within (Penguin Classics):
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While this new translation of "La Bete Humaine" starts off a bite more melodramatic than some of Zola's other works, in the end the author succeeds in drawing the reader into a nightmarish world of infidelity, greed, abuse, murder and madness. This is a thought-provoking work - equal in many respects to "Crime and Punishment" - although at times Zola's depiction of blood lust and violence (especially violent acts committed against women) are hard to handle. Yet, however sensationalized or gratuitous the violence and depravity seems, I hope it is obvious that this is meant to be a social commentary rather than a celebration of certain kinds of reprehensible behavior. Another possible criticism is that there are too many ideas floating around in this novel - Zola in fact formed the plot by combining two separate story ideas into one book, which I think makes it less focused than some of his other works ("Germinal" or "L'Assommoir" for example) - and the author's ideas about heredity and crime seem less believable today than perhaps they would have to contemporary readers.Yet, these points aside, "The Beast Within" is still a fascinating read and a deeply unsettling look at the human condition.
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