The Kill

Here is a true publishing event–the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction’s giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola’s <i>The Kill</i> (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author’s twenty-volume <i>Rougon-Macquart</i> saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.<br><br>The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée’s financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and “the capital of the nineteenth century.” In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman’s spirit and a city’s soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world’s premier translators from the French, <i>The Kill</i> contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by “infernal intelligence.”<br><br>In this new incarnation, <i>The Kill</i> joins <i>Nana</i> and <i>Germinal</i> on the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who–explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting–always goes in for the kill. Here is a true publishing event–the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction’s giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola’s <i>The Kill</i> (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author’s twenty-volume <i>Rougon-Macquart</i> saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.<br><br>The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée’s financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and “the capital of the nineteenth century.” In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman’s spirit and a city’s soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world’s premier translators from the French, <i>The Kill</i> contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by “infernal intelligence.”<br><br>In this new incarnation, <i>The Kill</i> joins <i>Nana</i> and <i>Germinal</i> on the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who–explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting–always goes in for the kill.