Emile zola brief biography of james patterson

Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Rate this book. This volume was published in and also has a biographical and critical introduction, synopses of the plots, bibliographical note, map, genealogy, etc. The bulk of the dictionary is an alphabetical list of every character from the 20 Rougon-Macquart novels with a sentence to paragraph long description.

The books sub-title says it also "a biographical and critical introduction, synopses of the plots, bibliographical note, map, genealogy, etc. I find keeping track of the 's of characters in each of Zola's novels difficult, they are non-English names that don't "stick" and are easily confused between similar sounding names, and many characters have more than one name depending on family relations.

Even the primary characters have complex histories that it is helpful to have a summary for. Zola wrote "crowded novels" with characters showing up only once or twice.

Emile Zola, who lived

It's easy to skip over them if you don't remember who they are, perhaps briefly introduced pages back and mentioned only once again, they are not central to the plot, but one misses the depth of Zola's intent. The downside is they are all listed alphabetically in one giant list without regard to which novel they are from although this is noted at the end of each description - so it's a chore to search the dictionary looking up a name - it would be better to have a single-page reference list of all characters within a particular novel to avoid page flipping through the dictionary.

Another problem is it contains serious and unnecessary plot spoilers. However, the plot spoilers are towards the end of each entry, so if one is in the middle of reading the novel and want a reminder of who a character is, just read the first sentence or two of the entry this is not always easy! Finally, the descriptions were written with the values of a Victorian moralist and will occasionally be laughable to the modern reader.

I found this to be a bonus in helping understand the perspective of the age and what the English censors were so concerned about.