Le Ventre de Paris (Dodo Press) (Paperback)

from SeriousGrace

The "Belly of Paris" is quite literally a giant receptacle of food merchants. It is a giant food market brimming with a wide array of delicacies of all shapes and sizes. In the first 50 pages I counted no less than sixty different types of food described in colorful detail. The word 'vegetable' a...

from arubabookwoman

This third in the Rougon-Macquart novels focuses on the people of Las Halles, a huge market in Paris for vegetables, fish, flowers, fowl, and just about anything else. Florent, a former revolutionary, has escaped from Devil's Island. He returns to Paris to live with his brother and sister-in-law ...

from Smiler69

When half dead and starving escapee Florent Quenu returns to Paris after having been wrongfully held as a political prisoner following Napoleon IIIs coup d'état in 1851, he finds his way to the recently built indoor food market Les Halles, where his younger brother (simply known as Quenu) owns a ...

from Paulagraph

Set in the quartier of Les Halles in Paris in the time of the Second Empire (Napoleon III) circa 1858-60. In this era (post 1848) of demolition and reconstruction (Baron Haussmann remade Paris into a City of Light with wide boulevards & imposing edifices replacing narrow streets & crowded medieva...

from amelish

(first of all, this cover is CRAP) I wrote some of my thesis about this book (!!!), in part on the imagery of smells in the sections describing Les Halles (Parisian central marketplace built in the mid-19th century). Zola writes incredible, wonderful, sometimes overpoweringly detailed and evocat...