Les Frères Zemganno Reading Order

Les Frères Zemganno (1879) by Edmond de Goncourt is his most intimate novel — a study of two circus acrobat brothers, Gianni and Nello, and the destruction of their act when Nello is permanently injured in a fall and Gianni realizes that the great performance they had planned together can never happen. The novel is a thinly veiled allegory of Edmond's relationship with his brother Jules (who died of syphilis in 1870): Gianni is Edmond, Nello is Jules, and the 'acrobatic work' they will never complete together is the literary project the two brothers undertook together in their decades of collaboration. Les Frères Zemganno is Edmond de Goncourt's most emotionally direct novel and the one that reveals most clearly the nature of his grief for Jules — a grief that all his solo novels after 1870 express more or less obliquely, but that Les Frères Zemganno expresses directly through the allegory of the two brothers who can no longer perform together. The circus milieu, documented with the Goncourts' characteristic research precision, is also independently interesting: the backstage world of the nineteenth-century Parisian circus, its performers, its training methods, and its social world are rendered with the same documentary exactness that the Goncourts brought to the hospital and the literary salon.