have finally come to the last delicious word on the last delicious page of Zola's "au Bonheur des Dames", and thoroughly enjoyed every page of it.
I also found it an absolutely delightful book! So un-Zola like. It's recommended for anyone who usually passes on Zola's books because they find them too dark.
Per usual, Zola did plenty of research prior to writing Au Bonheur des dames. It's a good primer for the history of the first gigantic department stores. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall to see Zola shopping for hours with his wife.
It's the first of Zola's works that I have read, and my teenage daughter groaned when she heard me raving about it. She's studying for a literary
Baccalauréat, so Zola's work is among the French classics on her reading list, and she finds it too boring, too detailed and too slow for her.
Au Bonheur came across as a detailed yet fun book, which really conveys the social mores, the lifestyle and the restrictions of the era. In parallel to detailing the phenomenal success of the rise of department store, the book offers a wealth of detail about the types of goods that people hankered after at the time, the difference between the classes, the old gentry and all it represents vs the brash youngster making his millions on the back of hard work and vision. There's a real sense of the industrial revolution happening, the slow pace of pre-industrial life yielding reluctantly but inexorably to impulsivity, rapidity, hard-nosed business acumen. There's a blurring of the previously strictly upheld class barriers and taboos. The cold and clinical "hard sell" taking the place of the previously genteel business of the craftsman working with the client to create a unique materpiece.
I found it absolutely fascinating!
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