Lourdes

Émile Zola

2021 թ. մյս · Graphic Arts Books

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Lourdes (1894) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. Lourdes is the first installment in Zola’s celebrated Three Cities Trilogy. Published toward the end of Zola’s career, the trilogy is an ambitious, sweeping study of one man’s struggle with faith in political, religious, and social life. Following his protagonist Abbé Pierre Froment, Zola provides a striking portrait of the soul of modern man in crisis with itself and with an ever-changing world. Lourdes opens as Abbé Froment departs on a journey from Paris to the holy city of Lourdes. Accompanied by his childhood love, a woman who was paralyzed in an accident at the age of thirteen, Froment hopes to rediscover his faith and to reestablish his position in a beleaguered Catholic Church. There, they meet a series of diverse pilgrims, all of them dissatisfied, all of them searching for something to change or to hold onto. For Froment, this journey begins as a way to help an old friend and becomes a chance at redeeming his wayward soul. At Lourdes, surrounded by desperate, yet faithful people, he begins to remember what brought him to God in the first place. Inspired by his experiences there, he wonders if one priest could change the Church for the better. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Émile Zola’s Lourdes is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.