The Belly of Paris ~ Emile Zola

If a book can be written like an impressionist painting then this novel is it.  The plot itself is rather banal with its direction only becoming evident within the last few chapters, but it's the descriptions of the food in the markets that make the reading of this book so worth while.

The premise is simple—Florent, a wrongly convicted man, has escaped from Devil’s Island and returns to Paris.  The opening scene has him lying close to death in the road where he is rescued by a woman on her way to Les Halles markets with a cart-load of vegetables.

Florent re-unites with his brother who is a corpulent owner of a butcher shop, and married to the plump but ‘beautiful’ Lisa.  Welcomed with open arms, Florent soon finds his feet but is dissatisfied with how much Paris has changed and the greed and complacency of the well-to-do.  Rather than comparing the rich with the poor he looks at them as being the ‘fat’ and the ‘thin’.  Lisa and her husband are ‘fat’ and ‘plump’ whereas Florent himself is always described as being thin, skeletal or a ‘longshanks’ and his appearance give rise to some sort of fear, or alarm, to those around him.

Florent begins to spend his evenings with a group of equally dissatisfied friends, and between them they discuss the idea of a starting a revolution.  When the beautiful Lisa gets wind of this, she cannot stand to think that something could happen to change her comfortable way of life and, unbeknownst to her husband, plots to betray Florent to the authorities.

The story is totally centred around Les Halles markets and it’s various gossiping and bitchy stallholder’s and the butcher shop.  Zola truly ‘paints’ with wonderfully descriptive words the colours, sights and smells of all the food at the markets.  And, oh boy, I could certainly smell the fish market and it was quite disturbing to see how the food was stored and handled there without the knowledge of today’s food handling practices.

One morning as the light begins to illuminate the fish market Zola remarks:

“…… these precious colours, toned and softened by the waves—the iridescent flesh-tints of the shell-fish, the opal of the whiting, the pearly nacre of the mackerel, the ruddy gold of the mullets, the plated skins of the herrings, and the massive silver of the salmon.  It was as though the jewel-cases of some sea-nymph had been emptied there—a mass of fantastical, undreamt-of  ornaments, a streaming and heaping of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, barbaric gems and jewels, the use of which could not be divined.”

There are plenty of passages like this, one even describing the various tones and shades of the green vegetables.  It  certainly makes you look at your food in a different way. 

I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, but I can say that I really appreciated the writing, and by the end of the novel I felt like a glutton myself for having been exposed to so much food.