The Masterpiece

Goodness gracious - I inhaled this. Great characters, amazing descriptions, incredibly depressing ruminations on the perils of the creative life. The arc of it is Zola-esque, apparently - a balloon deflating in slow motion. I waited for a while to try him, and I'm already excited to read more.......more

You have this friend, a writer. He’s written this terrible bildungsroman about his tedious student exploits, I Want Vagina. You tell him tactfully that a 900-page, unspellchecked homage to sexual frustration doesn’t fly in the marketplace. Your friend scurries off and signs up for a Creative Writing......more

4,75 je ne note pas mes livres de cours avant de les avoir étudiés, mais celui ci... wow je ne pensais vraiment pas que je serais capable d’autant l’aimer, je pense que c’est maintenant mon classique préféré et je ne pensais vraiment pas possible pour moi d’être autant capturée dans un classique com......more

Including L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece), I’ve so far read five of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series by Emile Zola (the other four being: La Curee (The Kill), L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop), Nana (Nana) and Le Ventre (The Belly of Paris)). All five are set in kaleidoscopic Paris. The period is some......more