Recommendations
Books Like Les Frères Zemganno
Best books to read after Les Frères Zemganno by Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt's 1879 circus novel is an allegory of his fraternal literary partnership with Jules and the most intimate expression of his grief for his brother. Readers drawn to its combination of documentary precision, circus milieu, and elegiac fraternal feeling will find the most important companions in the Goncourts' collaborative novels, in other Naturalist novels of the performing world, and in the tradition of the fraternal bond in French fiction.
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Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The fully realized Goncourt collaborative method — the novel that Les Frères Zemganno mourns is most directly apprehended through the works Jules and Edmond made together, of which Germinie Lacerteux is the most important.
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Renée Mauperin
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts at their most accessible and humane — a portrait of a young woman that shows the range of the collaborative method beyond the pure Naturalist documentation of the lower classes.
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La Faustin
by Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond's solo successor — a study of a great actress that uses the performing milieu with the same documentary precision as Les Frères Zemganno, and that shows the development of his method after Jules's death.
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Nana
by Émile Zola
Zola's great novel of the performing woman — the actress and courtesan Nana is the fullest French Naturalist engagement with the performing world that parallels Les Frères Zemganno's circus milieu from a different social angle.
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Manette Salomon
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts at their most complex — a study of a painter whose art is first liberated and then destroyed by his model, the Jewish woman Manette Salomon, showing the full range of the brothers' collaborative work.
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L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
Zola's masterpiece of working-class life — the fullest realization of the Naturalist method that Les Frères Zemganno applies to the circus world, applied instead to the Parisian washing-women and artisans of the Goutte-d'Or.
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La Fille Élisa
by Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond's first solo novel — his prison exposé, the immediate predecessor of Les Frères Zemganno in his post-Jules career, and the work that shows the continuity and the change between the collaborative and the solo method.
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Charles Demailly
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' study of the artist destroyed by a woman — the journalist and novelist Charles Demailly is Les Frères Zemganno's closest thematic sibling in the collaborative oeuvre, mapping the same anxiety about artistic life onto the journalistic rather than the circus world.
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