L'Assommoir [The Drinking Den] cover art

L'Assommoir [The Drinking Den]

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L'Assommoir [The Drinking Den]

By: Émile Zola
Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
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About this listen

Brutal, gripping, and heart-wrenching, L'Assommoir (also known as The Drinking Den) chronicles the tragic downward spiral of Gervaise Macquart, a good-natured and hardworking laundress who slides into alcoholism and despair.

After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business, and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation, and violence.

Disturbingly realistic, L'Assommoir is a vivid portrayal of life in late 19th-century Paris.

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Public Domain (P)2019 Naxos AudioBooks Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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A remarkable viewing window into working-class life in 19th century Paris. Beautifully written and translated into English from the original French. the narrator has a beautiful reading style. A story that tugs at the heart.

Wonderful story telling, beautifully read.

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Leighton Pugh gives another brilliant rendering of a Zola novel, in this case a trenchant and bleak critique of alcoholism and poverty in working-class Paris of the 1850s and 60s. The story is perhaps a trifle less ingenious and even more relentless than other Zola novels, and has tinges of Victorian sentimentality and social crusading, but overall is a powerful and moving critique of a ruthless and uncaring economy and a debauched and rootless society. Zola seems to have a particular affinity for the difficulutes facing poor women amid vicious domestic violence, pervasive prostitution and the health effects of the demon drink.

Brilliant performance of a troubling Zola novel.

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