Le ventre de Paris

Troisième livre de la série des Rougon-Macquart de Zola ; après avoir lu ce livre, je me susprend parfois a faire comme Claude et à essayer de catégoriser les gens autour de moi en tant que "gras" et "maigres". La bataille des gras et des maignes n'est pas que la différence physique entre les êtres, c'est le symbole plus profond de la guerre que se livrent la ville, les Halles de Paris, Lisa, les "honnêtes gens" et la nature, Nanterre, Florent.

Florent revient de Cayenne, où il a été exilé pour de mauvaises raisons par l'empire, et d'où il s'est échappé. Son arrivée à Paris, alors qu'il est famélique, au beau milieu des Halles est pour Zola l'occasion de démontrer la l'indécente jouissance et l'orgie de nourriture dont font preuve l'empire et les honnêtes gens qui profitent de l'empire; s'ensuivront de longues description, de boucherie, charcuterie, boulangerie, patisserie, poissonnerie, fromagerie, présentées comme des tableaux flamboyants, ou des symphonies bruyantes. Avec les gras, c'est le triomphe du ventre sur l'esprit. Comme dans la curée, Zola montre les excès de l'empire, au travers de ses personnages et de leurs actes.

Florent retrouve son frère, Quenu, à la tête d'une boucherie avec sa femme Lisa, tout en ventre et en gorge. Lisa acceptera d'héberger le maigre et tout au long du roman, tentera de l'assimiler à la société, de l'engraisser et d'en faire un honnête homme; la tâche se rvèle non seulement impossible, mais Florent a tellement vécu, rêvé, qu'il devient un maigre entier, et s'enferme dans un idéaliste qui l'éloigne de tout autour de lui. Ses théories politiques branlantes l'entraineront dans une misérable et prévisible fin, qu'il n'est que trop content d'accueillir, n'ayant pas la force d'agir dans quelque sens que ce soit.

Imaginons que Zola ressorte de sa tombe aujourd'hui : Que dirait-il des orgies de consommation que nous réalisons en cette période d'avant Noël? Que dirait-il de nos politiciens, qui ne connaissent que le discours e la langue de bois? Que dirait-il de ces écarts toujours grandissants entre riches et pauvres? Que dirait il de ces empires industriels et commerciaux plus forts que les états, de ces publicités et programmes télévisés qui lavent le cerveaux des gens? Que dirait-il de ces femmes-objets plates qui exhibent leurs os à longueur de pages de magazines et d'affiches sur les murs?
Mon avis : il retournerait sous terre devant tant d'inhumanité, car il n'y a plus grand chose à sauver...

Allez hop, comme à chaque fois quand j'ai lu un livre un peu grave, il me faut un livre plus léger à lire. J'ai un candidat sous la main : je n'ai jamais lu Asimov, ce sera l'occasion de commencer.

Trauma Center : Under the Knife

Well, this one is a medical simulation. Medical like in "you are projected in ER, and this guy is all bloody, you've got to operate and save him". You get to suture, cut, burn with the laser, desinfect, incise, whatever is needed to save your patient from dying. Because your patient is going to die. A lot.
Graphically, the game is nice, the dialogs are text-based, but the real caracteristic of this game is that it's really hard : at the beginning, the nice nurse easily walks you through your first operations, but at the third or fourth one, the difficulty dramatically increases, the nurse leaves you in charge, and your patient dies. I've had to try it four times before getting it right (with the worst score imaginable, but the patient is alive...). As you progress, tasks become more and more complicated, the time limit gets thin but if you insist, you'll learn to manipulate quickly and efficiently the tools and the game will get a little easier; but from time to time, there is an almost impossible mission... that is unless you try and try and try... This is where I am, I've got to save 5 persons infected with the Kiriaki virus; this would be an easy task but I've got only 10 minutes to do it and I need at least 30 seconds more... ?But I'll keep trying till I save all my patients!
Great and difficult game, so it's not for you if you don't like things to resist :)

Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney

An attorney simulation where you can scream "Objection!" in the middle of a trial : I could not resist and I've tried the game. Well you've seen the result, I've done nothing but play this game until I've reached the end. This is not an action-packed, graphical-effects-loaded game, but an interesting and addicting game nonetheless: you are a defense attorney and, for each case (there are five cases), you first gather evidence (point-and-click-style), and meet witnesses (text based conversations), and then, you have to cleverly use all evidence to get a "Not guilty" verdict for your client.
I went through the whole game, it's sometimes hard to find the right combination, but it's always logical so the more you get into the game, the less mistakes you make. In my opinion, the characters are what make this game great : they have great expressions, some of them are funny, some loony, some completely raving mad, but they mostly are ... different... and this makes a lot of situations very funny.
I'll recommand it, it changes from your usual vroom-vroom-shoot-kill game.

Long time no blog... again

although a lot less than last time ;)
OK my excuses this time aren't gonna be original, since real life and work kept intruding on me in the last months. Well, that and Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center... The consequence is I've been unusually long to read "Le Ventre de Paris". I've read it on and off for the last two months, but now that I'm finished, let's deal with those matters in new entries.

Mario & Luigi : Partners in Time

Finished the game yesterday evening and it's been the best game for me on my DS to date. It took me more than an hour and a half of intense battle to defeat the final boss and her evil twin sister, but I did it! I saved Princess Peach in a whooping 24 in-game hours... OK, let's get back to things that really matter.

In the Clothes named fat

Early morning a couple days ago, since I had not much to do at the office, I dropped by to the Virgin store and hunted for a quick read when I found this manga "In the clothes named fat". I couldn't help reading from cover to cover.
The graphism is not my cup of tea, but it's not here to show off but to serve the story and the characters. Noko is the fat girl in today's fat-phobic society. Her boyfriend likes sex with her but hides her and keeps her into submission. At work, the situation is the same and, since she has such a low self esteem, she keeps getting trampled on by everyone. She's got to react, and she'll start a diet... all for the worse. That's for the pitch.
The story and the main character are very interesting and the author draws a very disgusting picture of our attitude towards fat people. Come on people! Be a bit open minded! Aren't you sick of all these unhealthy unsexy skeleton-models every everywhere?

Live from Golgotha

Saint Timothy, when thinking about what to write in his gospel:

I think that suppressing Jesus' weight problem has given us a distorted view of His psychology which was itself distorted - if not downright peculiar.

Saint Timothy:

Jesus aka Marvin Wasserstein is a raving maniac and I can see how his activity must have given poor Pontius Pilate the shivers, not to mention the Temple personnel, dedicated as they were to high interest rates and low inflation.

Live from Golgotha is a novel from Gore Vidal. Before being lent the book, I had never heard from the author nor the novel. Well that was an interesting read : by interesting, I mean funny and refreshing, I do not mean that this book will get you into philosophical debates. It globally is a satire based on the meeting of two opposite concepts, religion and market economy, that are usually not on the same level, but that nonetheless share more common traits than meets the eye.

Timothy, the future Saint Timothy, is a disciple of Saint Paul, father of Christianity. They both go from roman province to roman province to spread the "Good News" (which everyone that has read a gospel knows), not mentioning too much of the "Great embarassment" (that Jesus has said that He would come back and He still hasn't). So their conversion of the local peoples are a mix of juggling, tap dancing, double entries bookkeeping and sex. There is a crisis going on between the major saints : Markt thinks the Good News should be reserved for Jews that have done with their embarrassing centimeters of chair on their organ of procreation, Peter is called the Rock because he's as stupid as a rock, and Paul copyrights the cross as the Christianity logo and invents the trinity in order to wrap his idea into a mystic and desirable package (you always prefer to believe in things that you do not understand).
Well, all this little world is shattered to pieces when a hacker from the 20th century finds the way to tamper with the past and starts erasing the gospels; then, NBC, pressed by the shareholders that don't like it when the audience drops, plans to send a crew on Golgotha to shoot the Christ's crucifixion... but they are double crossed by a double agent. Saint Timothy, in the middle of all this mess, manipulated by vision and apparition of 20 century businessmen, will try to sort it out by writing his one and true gospel, that tells the real truth. But whose truth?

I've loved the novel. It's a bit long sometimes but a funny read nonetheless for someone that is not too much into religious zealotry. Anyway, it does point to what make me the most sceptic : Christianity is based on books modified by many hands, on a Good News spread by person's that have never seen the Christ and on events that took place 2000 years ago... Come on... Nowadays, the children can't even learn from the mistakes of their elders... So who in his own mind can rely on a word of mouth message spread for 20 centuries?

Finally, the novel is not only a fun read but maybe it has triggered some thoughts in me...

Sin City

Very violent, graphically beautiful. Nothing to add that every raving review has not done yet.

Just an advice : keep the kids away.

Pirates of the Caribbean

Johnny Depp is as usual (which is a compliment) and perhaps even better, Keira Knighley is beautiful, and Orlando Bloom doesn't exist. Minuses : the story takes a long time to really start up, and it's sometimes filled with disgusting Disneyish heart-wrenching violin-backed impossible-love scenes (The ones that make you laugh instead of cry, urgh!) ; moreover, you can most of the times predict what will happen five minutes later. Pluses : all the rest, which is a lot.

Not a bad one, very entertaining I would say.

X-Men 3

Preliminary note : I've never read the comics so I wouldn't be able to say if the movie is true to the comics'story. That being said, Woah!, many many changes happen in this episode of the X-men, too much changes actually. I found it not to be as good as the previous episodes : I think it lies in the fact that the epic dimension of the battle between mutants and men is not too well rendered, and the central character of this episode, Jean Gray, is definitely not as charismatic as Wolverine or Mystique.

Trying to picture in an hour something as extraordinay as a political and civil war, while following a defined set of characters in their individual or collective actions demands great control on the way the story is built. I personnaly find that the scope the movie is trying to cover is way too large and thus, while trying to do "too much", it does "not enough".

However, for those who like them, it's nice to meet the X-men again.

La Curée

"La Curée" est le second livre de la série des Rongon-Macquart de Zola. La curée est un terme de chasse qui désigne le moment où les chiens se jètent sur la bête coincée pour la dépecer.

Ici, les chiens, ce sont Aristide Rougon, dit Saccard, second fils de Pierre Rougon, et ses accolytes, et la victime, c'est Paris : si Paris est le Paris que l'on connait, c'est en grande partie due aux aménagements d'Haussman sous le second Empire. La percée des grands boulevards dans Paris et les travaux titanesques qui en ont résultés ont été l'occasion d'une spéculation particulière sur les terrains et biens immobiliers se trouvant sur le tracé de ces futurs boulevards. Ainsi des fortunes rapides se sont faites sur le dos de la ville de Paris, en proie à tous ces chiens prêts à acheter à bas prix, à revendre à des prix exhorbitants, à exproprier à tour de bras. Tout ce que cette activité peut compter de déversement d'argent et de luxe, de débauche, de corruption, de détournement et d'abus de biens est décrit dans ce livre, ce qui lui valu un scandale lors de sa parution.

Zola se plaît à découper les agissements de l'empire, tel Saccard découpant Paris sur la butte Montmartre.

[SPOILER COMING...]

La Curée, c'est l'histoire de Saccard, qui arrive pauvre à Paris, et qui enrage et bouillonne dans sa misère. Il veut jouir vite et fort et, attendant patiemment son heure (et la mort de sa femme), il va épouser Renée. Renée lui apporte deux choses : une forte dot qui va permettre à Saccard de décoller et une femme extraordinairement belle, un passe-partout dans les milieux auxquels Saccard aspire. Ensuite, c'est le déchaînement des appétits de Saccard ; il aime l'argent, il use de toutes les fraudes et intrigues possibles pour en gagner et ne regarde pas quand il dépense, presque désintéressé. C'est le fleuve d'or arrosant Paris que décrit Zola, prenant sa source dans les coffres de Saccard, qui met toute son énergie à les remplir aussi vite qu'il les vide.

La Curée, c'est aussi l'histoire de Renée, qui quitte l'austère hôtel de son père, et qui découvre brutalement une vie de débauche, sans aucun interdit. Renée est jeune, belle et insouciante : bientôt, sa vie n'est plus faite que de robes sublimes (et très chères), de ragots mondains, d'amants, d'autant plus que Saccard paie toutes ses factures et ferme les yeux sur tous ses écarts. Mais rapidement, la belle se lasse et il lui en faut plus : elle s'amourache alors de Maxime, fils mou et androgyne de Saccard que son père a fait venir à Paris. L'inceste, la domination de cet être asexué la grise, elle s'y perd totalement et l'arrêt brutal de cette relation, la renonciation facile de Maxime, et l'indifférence de Saccard l'achèvera. Renée cherchait des limites et elle n'en trouva pas. L'indifférence tue.

Bon, prochaine lecture, le troisième livre des Rougon-Macquart, "Le Ventre de Paris", mais je crois que je vais lire un truc un peu plus "léger" d'ici là...

The Butterfly Effect

My first reaction after the beginning of the movie was : hey, that's Kelso from "That Seventies Show". I used to watch this show some years ago and it was fun.
Apparently, Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) has grown up and he's able to do more than looking stupid (don't get me wrong, I think he does that well too ;) )

I had never heard of the movie before watching it and I think that if you can accept the idea that the main character can alter his past (kind of like "Back to the Future, but without the DeLorean) you can get into the movie. There are a couple of strange and even illogic things (he can change the past but come back into the same reality.... that's not the same theory as Doc/Emmett Brown...) but I wasn't in the mood for thinking too much about it :)

Overall, I really enjoyed it, well organized, well directed, nice effects, OK actors. I even think this movie has "the little something" that makes a movie a really good movie.

[EDIT and SPOILER]
I've read some comments around the web and apparently, there are several endings to the movie. I've seen the version where Evan goes back to the womb to strangle himself. My understanding of the ending is that the two stillborn children his mother had had before him did the same thing Evan does, which is why she has not been able to have kids with Evan's father. Afterwards though, she meets another man and is able to have a "normal" child... My two cents...

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun: [in concerned tone] Mum, have you been bitten?
Barbara: No, but Philip has.
Shaun: Oh, OK.
Ed: [concerned] What's going on?
Shaun: We might have to kill my step-dad.
Ed: Oh, OK.

Aaahhh, this was the good zombie movie I had been waiting for. It keeps the rules of the genre while not taking itself seriously. It's not always very subtle (fart jokes inside) but it's hilarious... You gotta love the moment when they just throw anything at the zombie-girl in the backyard, I just laughed out loud in my quiet train.

To sum it up, Shaun is a loser; a small employee with no other goal in life than to have his pint of beer every evening at the local pub with his best friend Ed who is even more a loser than he is since he's got no job, and just spend his days and nights squatting his friend's couch playing video games. Shaun's also got a beautiful girlfriend who's getting a bit tired of waiting for him to grow up and a mom with whom he has a complicated relationship.

And just when the world around him is filling up with zombies (?!), he decides to sort his life out.

Go see this movie for a good time. Period.

Rosemary's Baby

I watched Polanski's Rosemary's Baby yesterday and I must confess that I was pretty excited about it, since I had read a couple of rather good reviews about it. Well, I am disappointed : the movie is more than 2 hours long, nothing really happens in the first half and it falls flat at the end... There's some nice tension at some point and then : PFEWWWWwwww... The end cannot be called an end, there's just nothing, no explanation, nothing to think about, 'hail Satan' being the only thing the author could come up with; it reminds me of a good gripping book by Stephen King that ends with aliens coming from outer space to destroy earth and the hero killing them with a screwdriver and a banana.
Somewhere in the middle of the ovie, when it began to be interesting, I was prepared to trade the slow start for a good end but it's just not really worth it.

I would definitely not recommend it.

[EDIT]
After I wrote this, I browsed around and saw nothing but "best this" and "most that"... Well, it still didn't scare me nor compelled me to any feeling and the end is still bad.

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

Worst. Movie. Ever.

Not that it has no story to tell or is badly directed, but it is so horrible and so crude that it is simply not possible to watch it without flinching. Pasolini must have been the most devious person on earth... I can find nothing, and will never be able to agree with people that find good reasons (philosophy, voyeurism or other) for making this movie.

If you like to endlessly endure footage of rape and torture, this is for you, but if you are a human being, stay away!

Narutomania

When I left my last position in France Telecom, my collegues (well hinted by my wife) offered me the first 7 volumes of the manga "Naruto". Naruto is a very famous best seller and before reading it, I thought that it was on the same level as dragon ball, so I had never bothered. Well, since I know every detail of Sangoku's story, I guess that what has was to happen next was obvious. So in the last 3 weeks I've bought the following volumes up to the 20th, read them at the speed of light, twice, and am craving to buy the other ones.... But I've got to restrain myself, since money doesn't grow on trees.
That's why I was standing today at lunch in the Virgin bookstore close to my workplace reading the 21st volume, to discover what would happen next...
So, yes, I guess I'm addicted to Naruto.

Robert des Noms Propres

Ce qu'il y a de bien avec les livres d'Amélie Nothomb, c'est qu'on sait qu'on ne passera pas 6 mois à les lire : il n'y a pas beaucoup de pages.
Parce contre, ce qui n'est pas bien avec les livres d'Amélie Nothomb, c'est que ces quelques pages, on sait qu'on va devoir les lire d'une traite.

Le Robert des Noms Propres n'échappe pas à cette habitude ; pourtant, je n'ai pas bien compris le pourquoi du titre (un truc d'artiste certainement) et le "pitch" en contre couverture du livre n'a pas grand rapport avec le contenu dudit livre (ou alors une fois de plus, je ne l'ai pas compris). La naissance de Plectrude est entourée de violence (sa mère tue son père, va en prison, accouche et se suicide, et tout ça dans les premières pages du roman) mais, receuillie par sa tante, elle l'ignorera ; d'un comportement souvent extrême, elle se jètera à corps perdu dans la danse jusqu'à l'auto-destruction... je n'en raconterai pas plus.

Finalement, il n'y a pas grande différence entre l'idée avancée par Amélie Nothomb, qui sous-entend que Plectrude hérite entièrement son caractère de celui de sa mère et que ses actes en découlent, et l'approche de Zola dans les Rougon-Macquart, qui fait se mélanger les qualités et les tares au gré de l'arbre généalogique, très peu de personnages échappant à la névrose originelle de la tante Dide.

Lord of War

Yuri Orlov to Jack Valentine:

And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss... the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year... sometimes it's embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns.
(...)
So... you call me evil, but unfortunaly for you, I'm a necessary evil

Watching this movie is like a reminder to get you out of your daily thoughts : the world that we live in is a mirror picture of what we are : in human acts, there is a lot of black, a lot of grey and very little white; and the whiter the acts, the surer you can be that they are only demagogy brought up to cover the worst.

So, back to the plot: this guy, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage in a rather good performance), sells arms the way he would sell candy or diet coke: with a great marketing slab, profit & loss, etc... Since he is the main character, and since you are shown the details of his personal life, you are brought to sympathize with him, although he is the worst bastard earth ever produced : that's the strength of the movie : you can "understand" his worst decisions. Another strength is the fact that there is no or little bloodshed; most of it is suggested or not shown (but you know about it all the same...).
A great movie, with a crude and horrifying message : it's worth the time you'll lose to watch it. Oh, and the introduction sequence is a blast!

A Year in the Merde

Since this book is about France from an English point of view, I'll quick review it in English and French.

A Year in the Merde covers the not-so-fictive story of an Englishman in Paris. The author, Stephen Clarke has spent several years in France and has had many experiences in the differences between the two countries... So, wrapping them in his verve, he tells us the story of Paul West, who is hired by a French company to open tea salons. Paul will collide with all the details that that us French people so endearing and so unpleasant and the parisian life will reveal surreal to him.
This book is very funny, I've even had fits of laughter reading it (people look strangely at you when you laugh for no apparent reason in a very quiet train...). At length, the style can be a bit "heavy" but when speaking of French specificities, I think he's got it right.
For French readers who aren't afraid of a little original critic...

A year in the Merde raconte l'histoire pas-si-fictive-que-ça d'un Anglais à Paris. L'auteur, Stephen Clarke, a passé plusieurs années en France et a beaucoup d'expérience des différences entre les deux pays. Colorant ses expériences avec sa verve, il nous raconte l'histoire de Paul West, embauché par une boîte française pour ouvrir une chaine de salons de thé. Paul va se heurter à tous ces détails qui rendent les français si attachants et insupportables et la vie parisienne va se révéler complètement surréaliste.
Ce livre est très drôle, j'ai même eu des éclats de rire en le lisant (et eu des regards étranges de la part des passagers du wagon calme dans lequel je me trouvais à ce moment...). A la longue, le style est un peu lourd, mais je pense qu'il vise juste quand il parle des spécificités françaises.
Pour les lecteurs français qui n'ont pas peur d'un peu de critique originale...

The Last Temptation of Christ / The Passion of the Christ

One entry for two Christ movies : 1988 Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" and 2004 Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". Scorcese is trying to show Jesus as a man, with his share of doubts and failures ; Gibson is trying to shoot the last hours of Jesus'life as if he 'd been there.

Scorcese's movie seems to me to achieve his goal. Jesus is a real man, he does not know how to convey God's will, and like we do with our problems, he solves it by trying, failing and trying again. As a man, he falls for the devil's last temptation, but, given the context (he's on a cross, and he seems to suffer pretty badly, for Himself's sake ;) ), who would not fall for it. Scorcese is showing a (his?) version of the events that could have taken place and is not pretending to follow the scripture : anyway, you should NEVER believe what's written because it's written, be it in the Bible or not. I've like the subtle touches here and there : the role of Judas (who only betrays Jesus because Jesus commands him to do so), the hysterical scene of Jesus'baptism, the doubts of Jesus in the temple... In the end, what makes it work for me is the humanity of the human Jesus is a more-than-human scheme.

Gibson's movie was more difficult for me. It is supposed to be true to the writings of the Bible and it is globally OK on this : his Jesus is rather Bible-like (as opposed to the more human one of Scorcese) and the story brings no surprise to someone who knows his gospels ; moreover, since the dialogs are in aramean and latin, you almost feel back then. So basically, you spend two hours looking at Jesus being tortured at the hand of the romans and jews and watching blood dripping. Blood lovers will love this movie : Jesus loses almost as much blood than all the zombies of "Brain Dead" combined. This movie is, in my opinion, useful in this aspect : it reminds us of the violence it has taken to bring this Messiah down ; Watching the asepticized pictures of violence in the news everyday makes us forget the true horrors that happen in this world : at least, this movie makes things clear. Now, when I see a cross, I don't see the sacrifice of the Christ, I see the violence, the hatred and the religion, all mingled in a symbol carried around the necks of our kids.

Requiem for a Dream

I've always been really interested in stories that show why and how a human being can change, be it through redemption or through folly. This movie depicts the fall of 4 characters as they gradually become addicted to drugs.

As a TV-obsessed widow that succumb to madness and becomes addicted to diet pills, Ellen Burstyn gives hands down one of the best performances I've ever seen. She is either sad or overjoyed, pathetic and helpless and she'll make your heart scream with pain.
Jared Leto (as the son), Jennifer Connelly (as the girlfriend), Marlon Wayans (as a friend) are all heroïn/cocaïne addicted, and this addiction is the starting point of their hopes, and unfortunately, of their demises. Thier acting performance are excellent too.

The four character all have their hopes, their lives, they all want to do something to impress or protect the ones they love and their dreams first crack and then shatter to pieces. I've been impressed by the short flashes depicting the heroin injections or the pills ingestion : they don't last more than a couple seconds but amplify the fact that the addiction is settling in and is a part of their lives. In this light, the last scene has crushed me to my seat: the downward spiral is spinning faster and faster and the fall is really hard on the viewer. All four characters have predictably failed to save themselves.

A very beautiful movie that I would recommend everyone to see and I can assure you that if this movie does not change you, it will at least give you food for thought.

2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL: It can only be attributable to human error.

This scene is about 3 months old : I was remembering that I've seen bits of this Kubrick's masterpiece a long time ago, but this was a very vague remembrance. So I figured that I would watch it since it's supposed to be such a hit.
Now that I've seen it, I know why the remembrance is vague : I must have fallen asleep. It's a long and boring movie. OK, there's a couple of thoughtful or tense moments but they are so few of them that the last impression that stays is "boooring".

La Fortune des Rougon

OK, alors, quand j'avais 17 ans, j'avais commencé la lecture des Rougon-Macquart de Zola. J'avais abonadonné peu après, faute de temps. Donc, je reprends maintenant cette tentative...
La fortune des Rougons est le premier volume de la grande série des Rougon-Macquart écrite par Emile Zola. Cette série se veut à la fois une fresque historique de la France sous le second empire et une étude sociale et presque scientifique d'une famille et de son hérédité au cours de cette période.
Le point de départ de la famille est la tante Dide, une femme frêle, emportée et solitaire, qui aura 3 enfants, le premier de son mari et, après la mort de celui-ci, les 2 autres de son amant, un violent braconnier.
La fortune des Rougons place donc le cadre de cette fresque et présente une gallerie de personnages que Zola se plait à décrire : il montre comment les traits de caractère des ascendants se retrouvent dans la descendance et comment ces personnages se battent ou se débattent dans les événements qui les entourent; au final, ce qui l'intéresse le plus, ce sont les appétits démesurés des personnages : appétits de richesse, de puissance, de reconnaissance ou d'amour selon les personnages.

Au final, une vie entière de frustration, de calcul, de manipulation et d'opportunisme n'ont pas eu raison des appétits de domination et de jouissance de Pierre Rougon et de sa femme. Une belle leçon d'humanité...


Je ne vais pas me livrer à une étude littéraire en règle du livre, cela a surement été fait des centaines de fois, et je ne lis pas pour étudier mais pour mon plaisir. Ce livre est très plaisant, présente beaucoup d'action; l'action est présentée avec son lot de flashbacks (et oui, les jeunes, Tarantino n'a rien inventé...) permettant à l'auteur de jouer avec l'histoire. L'approche de Zola est bien sur biaisée par son opposition bonapartiste de l'époque, et par son approche parfois un peu trop systématique/scientifique de l'hérédité, mais j'apprécie le mélange des genres historique et romanesque... Cela me rappelle le "A Tale of Two Cities" de Dickens pendant la révolution française.
Hop au travail, je dois démarrer maintenant la lecture du tome 2 des Rougon-Macquart, "La Curée".

Long time no blog

Well, it looks like real life has taken me again for a long time. Enough time to have a son, change job, be a year older, and so on... Now, since I've not been inactive all that time, I'll try to catch on with my readings and viewings over this period. Or at least with the most significative ones ;)