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The Ladies' Paradise

Au Bonheur des Dames

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About this listen

Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) plays out in a colossal and opulent Parisian department store of the same name. Its owner, Octave Mouret, builds his innovative, upmarket women’s fashion empire at the expense of the city’s smaller, traditional shops.

A self-declared manipulator of women, Mouret not only plays on his female customers’ personal insecurities and social aspirations to keep his takings high, but also exploits his mostly female staff who work long hours in harsh conditions. After a difficult start, one young recruit, Denise Baudu, ends up giving Mouret much more than he bargained for.

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Public Domain (P)2021 Naxos AudioBooks UK Ltd. Classics
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Great novel if you're interested in post-1864 Paris society, architecture and impressionist painting. so much if this illuminates the world that those artists captured.

Great novel

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Fascinating look at the origins of the big department stores in Paris, and the development of an economic and fashion system we're still in today. If that sounds dry, it isn't: Zola is first and foremost concerned with the human beings who built this huge commercial machine, and the ones trapped in it. The narrator is perfect for the story, bringing out the humor in many places, and making a long book go, in the end, far too quickly.

Absorbing, multi-layered story and excellent narrator

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A long deeply descriptive detail of the birth of the one stop Department store and its impact on society, traditional small retail businesses and general employment practices.

Like Tolstoy, Zola is known for his long, sweeping descriptive prose. Zola paints his background of detailed aspects of life in mid 19th century France and the Industrial and commercial revolution.
Often set within a story of human nature, strife, exploitation, love and tragedy.

The Paradise is long on description, perhaps too much for my liking and less plot and story driven.
A good social commentary on the evolution in the retail trade but not the best novel in the RM series.

Phenomenal social commentary. Not his best novel.

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Written at a time before motion pictures, before the department store was a common shopping mall feature, the detailed description of every aspect of this magnificent enterprise would’ve captivated any reader. To appreciate this book from a modern vantage point, I think one needs to embrace the now much unnecessary detail with patience, like appreciating the brush strokes of a fine painting. The story itself and character development is equally meticulous and thus slow, but the careful layers create depth that is often otherwise lacking in modern stories. I enjoyed this on Audible; probably would’ve struggled to have found time to read the entirety in print.

An account as entrancing as its subject

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