I thought I’d give this novel a bash to see how far my attention span has degraded. In my teens and twenties the vast majority of what I read was massive 19th century novels, and I was curious if I still had the appetite for all that tiny text, description of landscape, and casual misogyny. Good news: yes I do!
This one tells about a man walking through 19th century France looking for a job. He is facing starvation when he lucks into work in a coal mine. Cue a lot of interesting detail about 19th century mining practices. As you can imagine its not good: while they don’t get to have much to eat, they do get to have coal lung, and lets not even get into the ponies permanently trapped down there.
I was kind of hoping this story might be about how this guy was delighted to escape from starvation to near-starvation, and went on to build a happy family life in the mines. LOL no. He is inspired by the idea of communism and eventually convinces everyone else to strike. At this point, it started to feel very much like THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair (same story, except 1930s/America/ abbatoir), a book that wrecked me in a Chicago airport maybe twenty years ago. I could just see where we were going with idealism crushed, people starving, immortal logic of capitalism triumphant and etc, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go through it. So I guess the good news is my attention span’s fine, but the bad news is my emotional resilience is SHOT.