Nana
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the glittering yet corrupt underbelly of Second Empire Paris, a city intoxicated by wealth, spectacle, and moral decay, Émile Zola's Nana chronicles the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Anna Coupeau — a voluptuous, irresistible courtesan who ascends from the gutter of the Parisian working class to reign over the city's most powerful men. Born into poverty and destitution, Nana bursts onto the stage of the Théâtre des Variétés, captivating audiences not through talent but through sheer, devastating physical allure, and proceeds to systematically ruin the aristocrats, financiers, and officers who worship at her feet. Zola renders her world in unflinching, almost clinical detail — the lavish apartments, the racetrack at Longchamp, the backstage intrigues — building an indictment of an entire society that mistakes appetite for freedom. Part of Zola's monumental twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, Nana stands as one of the most powerful examples of French Naturalism, a movement that treated human behaviour as subject to hereditary and environmental forces beyond individual will. Zola's prose is simultaneously lush and merciless, transforming Nana into a mythic figure — a destructive golden fly, as he famously describes her — who embodies the rottenness at the heart of the Second Empire. The novel argues that society's hunger for spectacle and sensation is its own undoing, a thesis rendered with breathtaking moral authority. Readers who enter Nana's world will find it impossible to look away — or to forget what they find there.
Author: Zola
Format: Paperback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the glittering yet corrupt underbelly of Second Empire Paris, a city intoxicated by wealth, spectacle, and moral decay, Émile Zola's Nana chronicles the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Anna Coupeau — a voluptuous, irresistible courtesan who ascends from the gutter of the Parisian working class to reign over the city's most powerful men. Born into poverty and destitution, Nana bursts onto the stage of the Théâtre des Variétés, captivating audiences not through talent but through sheer, devastating physical allure, and proceeds to systematically ruin the aristocrats, financiers, and officers who worship at her feet. Zola renders her world in unflinching, almost clinical detail — the lavish apartments, the racetrack at Longchamp, the backstage intrigues — building an indictment of an entire society that mistakes appetite for freedom. Part of Zola's monumental twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, Nana stands as one of the most powerful examples of French Naturalism, a movement that treated human behaviour as subject to hereditary and environmental forces beyond individual will. Zola's prose is simultaneously lush and merciless, transforming Nana into a mythic figure — a destructive golden fly, as he famously describes her — who embodies the rottenness at the heart of the Second Empire. The novel argues that society's hunger for spectacle and sensation is its own undoing, a thesis rendered with breathtaking moral authority. Readers who enter Nana's world will find it impossible to look away — or to forget what they find there.