Before I read this book I’d heard only a little about Emile Zola. When I saw this book standing on a parent’s bookshelf I decided to read it. The novel appeared a rude and realistic, however have plenty things to think about.
The story is developing in late XIX Century France. A young woman Nana is a prostitute who starts acting in the local theater. She doesn’t have any perfect acting or vocal talent, however every move of her body makes overwhelming impression on the spectators. Being a beautiful women who knows how to capture a men in her spider nets she leaves playing in a theater and starts looking for wealthy supporters. At the beginning, the street prostitute is depicted as a poor street girl who loves her little unhealthy son that is living with her aunt in the village and as a reader you sympathize with her. While things go on, the author develops her character from an ambitious women who wants to achieve something valuable in her life, towards the most desirable whore of Paris. It’s hard to count, how many people she lived with during that time. I wrote people, because sleeping with men was not enough for her and she had a lesbian relationships with another prostitute. Nana didn’t have any plan and was ruled only by her beast desires of wealth and pleasure. She had simultaneous relationships with men from every part of society: poor actors, dukes, journalists, servants, bankers, officers. Nana takes part in numerous games and destructive affairs, becomes very famous even in other capitals. There very tricky moment – from page to page your feelings are always changing from delight to hate doubling her behavior. You never know when Nana is really fallen in love and when she is playing a role for money. As you get closer to the end of the book, she become furious in her desire and rude with people who really loved her and were bringing to her foots all that they posses – money, moral, people’s respect and even life. She wastes money of all her lovers like hurricane leading them to bankrupts. Living in an extremely luxurious house with expensive decoration and furniture, the courtesan loose the feeling of reality and real money sense. She become a black hole for the lover’s property and morality. Many men suffer and demean themselves after all. Closer to the end, you don’t have any sympathy to Nana because she reveal her evil heard and poison she brings to the people’s souls.
At the same time, Zola shows us a moral, political and cultural degradation of all French society at that time by intersecting many people’s with the main character.

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