Emile Zola

The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Ladies' Paradise recounts the spectacular development of the modern department store in late nineteenth-century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the time.

"Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life too he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified.

"This new translation of the eleventh book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola's greatest novels of the modern city."

~~back cover

A fascinating book! Definitely a morality play of the 1% and how the majority of people think only of what they want to buy, and whether they can get it more cheaply. The rousing success of The Ladies' Paradise is vividly contrasted with the owners and workers in the small shops surrounding the new behemoth. They are slowly being run out of business, ground into poverty and failure, the loss of second and third generation family businesses. Mass production and quantity driving quality and pride of craftsmanship into futility.

I was amazed at how much this aspect of the book resonated with the current economic situation, and how difficult it was to be aligned with the small shopkeepers who stubbornly clung to their old ways, and ineffectively cursed the new way of business that was driving them to ruin. Unlike Dickens, who also railed against the rich who ground the poor to oblivion, Zola paints the new regime with bright hues as opposed to the surrounding dirty, dark, damp, squalid shops -- making the new store seem gay, modern, luxurious and infinitely more advantageous. The new employees are not treated badly by management, but spend a good deal of their energy and efforts at sabotaging each other to try to further their own status. The foibles and greed of the middle class customers are presented for ridicule and dismay, further underlining the inherent amorality of the new burgeoning capitalism.

Zola excels in describing the merchandise in glowing, lascivious terms -- underscoring the psychological traits which empower the growth and glamor of this rapidly growing phenomenon and shining a glaring spotlight on the greed and heedlessness of a good portion of the population.

In contrast, the love story seems almost an afterthought, just a vehicle to move the story along, provide continuity. I was disappointed in the ending -- there's no resolution there, although a bit of research indicates that this is not the last book in the saga, so perhaps the next book answers the question left hanging in this one.