What do you'll niggas think about Emile Zola?

Deceived* woops

rofl he's simply stating his opinion go backc to reddit you timid child

You didn't retort what I said at all.

Logical conclusion of literary naturalism. His thinking is highly empirical and positivistic, his characters have less soul than the world around them

If you're looking for empirical psychology embedded in literature zola is your guy

My grandmother said his books are disgusting immoral trash.

His books are fun to read. Colorful, ridiculous, even absorbing. Germinal is fine, but if I had to recommend two? Nana and La Terre.

I am still reading Nana but the imagery and the internal thoughts and dreams of the characters are not as powerful as Germinal.

Germinal was incredible but maybe it's the silly reasons of relating to Etienne that made me like it so much. My translation (Oxford World Classic's) got a bit lazy at the end (last 150 pages) in that sentences kept being written with "had had" and they weren't typing errors. More like "Etienne had had the suspicion that…" Came up maybe two or three times but did not affect any of the more powerful passages.

This is perhaps a mere matter of taste? What Nana wants in dreaming characters is perhaps made up for in gaudy atmospherics? Don't know! I do know that along with Terre and L'assommoir there are no better Zola novels. Have you read Balzac? If not I recommend Lost Illusions and the Splendours and Miseries of a Courtesan (which is the completing volume of the first I named). Sorry about your translation. For what it's worth I've had luck with Signets for both French and Russian Lit in English.

Germinal was goat. Also read L'Assomoir and Nana; might learn french to re read them

One of the books im reading now is Pere Goriot and The Wild Ass's Skin though I find him to be a little to prone to excessive wordiness. I haven't finished yet so I reserve judgment. The beginning of The Wild Ass's Skin was great though.

XIX th Century literature is boring as fuck. And Zola is nothing else than an opportunist that knew how to follow a trend. I'd understand why a journalist or an historian would read this.
If you want real literature from the XIXth century, go for Flaubert, the only one that managed to do something interesting among those stupid naturalists etc...

best spanish writet after Cervantes

Goiriot isn't a fair indication of what Balzac can do for all his wordiness (Proust, Montaigne, and Rabelais are wordy as well). Like Zola he over-produced, kept a schedule, and two-thirds of what he wrote is wooden, at least to our sensibilities. Zola's The Belly of Paris and The Masterpiece are in this way rigid. As is, for all it's fame, Goiriot. I remember thinking it a woodenification of Lear for all its this-orama and that-orama. At any rate like the past perfect, verboseness is hit or miss: the more truly intimate, the more successful it will be! The two Balzacs I suggested are the Vautrin novels, and that's the character you need to be familiar with--

Oh, I don't know. Flaubert was the best writer then I grant. Have you read Huysmanns' La Bas? It's no Sentimental Education, but it holds up very nicely in 2017. Also, many would rather commune with the dead, gain a sense of a time and place other than their own. If that's boring, so be it. Again, Flaubert was and still is a great artist. But Balzac and Zola are more indicative of mid and late 19thc. France, respectively. Imho..

Alright, I will look into those in that case. I was getting somewhat disappointed because those first pages in the gambling parlour of The Wild Ass's Skin were a great introduction to him and I felt that, if he could keep it up for a full novel, it'd be a great read.

>XIX th Century literature is boring as fuck

Read some Stendahl