Zola's masterpiece of appetite and exile unfolds in the stomach of Paris: Les Halles, the vast central market where a thousand smells fight for dominance and fortunes are made and lost before dawn. Florent stumbles into this world famished, fresh from fourteen years of political exile in Cayenne, his crime simply having opposed Napoleon III's Empire. His sister Lisa, a prosperous pork butcher and one of Zola's magnificent Macquart women, takes him in. But Paris has changed, and Florent discovers that even in a place overflowing with food, a hungry man can still starve. The market becomes a jungle where everyone spies on everyone, where the fat grow fatter and the thin grow thinner, where revolution simmers beneath the mountains of cheese and mountains of butter. Zola writes with the intensity of a man who believes novels can change the world: every stall, every vendor, every rotting turnip is a weapon in his argument about who feeds and who is fed. This is naturalism at its most visceral and its most political.
