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A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master Émile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This new translation finally captures his fast- paced yet deliberately dispassionate style. Set at the end of the Second Empire, when French society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new railways and locomotives it was building, The Beast Within is at once a tale of murder, passion, and possession and a compassionate study of individuals derailed by the burden of inherited evil. In it, Zola expresses the hope that human nature evolves through education but warns that the beast within continues to lurk beneath the veneer of technological progress.
Anonymous
Posted July 10, 2008
I have never felt this close to understanding the reasoning of a criminal. Every turn on the path of a murderer's mind is brought to be images before our eyes by Zola. Page after page, you might come to realize, though not necessarily to accept out loud, that there is a beast not only in Lantier, not only in Roubaud, but also in you.
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Posted September 19, 2010
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Posted October 20, 2011
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Posted May 17, 2009
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Overview
A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master Émile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This new translation finally captures his fast- paced yet deliberately dispassionate style. Set at the end of the Second Empire, when French society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new railways and locomotives it was building, The Beast Within is at once a tale of murder, passion, and...