Never in my life has it taken me almost a month to finish a single book that I loved every line of. I wish desperately that I was younger so I could buy and read all 22 volumes of this Journal. I am a fast reader which means I miss a lot and that allows me to reread my books often. My fear as I was reading this remarkable book was the knowledge that I would never have the time to reread it and so took my time absorbing every line, every phrase, every name dropped, every vivid description. It is a tiny pearl beyond price of a book. So alive and fascinating and brings to life so many people who are just names on the covers of famous books. I liked Edmond very much. I am sorry to have finished it and at the same time glad to go back to my free and easy way of reading. Journals and diaries really do require closer reading than novels of any genre. Karen

No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt

The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of color, variety, and seemingly casual perfection bears comparison with the great paintings of their friends and contemporaries the Impressionists.

Born nearly ten years apart into a French aristocratic family, the two brothers formed an extraordinarily productive and enduring literary partnership, collaborating on novels, criticism, and plays that pioneered the new aesthetic of naturalism. But the brothers’ talents found their most memorable outlet in their journal, which is at once a chronicle of an era, an intimate glimpse into their lives, and the purest expression of a nascent modern sensibility preoccupied with sex and art, celebrity and self-exposure. The Goncourts visit slums, brothels, balls, department stores, and imperial receptions; they argue over art and politics and trade merciless gossip with and about Hugo, Baudelaire, Degas, Flaubert, Zola, Rodin, and many others. And in 1871, Edmond maintains a vigil as his brother dies a slow and agonizing death from syphilis, recording every detail in the journal that he would
continue to maintain alone for another two decades. Professional

Hands-down the most entertaining book I've read all year. You need this in your life if you have any interest at all in French literature, the life of the mind, the creative process, or Gallic bitching on a monumental scale. Especially the last one.

Every page, and I mean every page, of this book contains one or more of the following:

1. A perfectly-polished aphorism;
2. An astonishing anecdote about a famous writer, or painter, or member of royalty;
3. A worm's-eye view of some major historical event;
4. A jaw-dropping insight into the ubiquity of nineteenth-century misogyny

…or all four. The nature of the Goncourts' social circle means that even the most Twitter-like entry of daily banality becomes interesting (‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert’), but more to the point there is so much here of the real life that never found its way into the fiction of the time. Reading this feels like finally finding out what all those characters in nineteenth-century novels, with their contrived misunderstandings and drawing-room spats, were really thinking about – the salacious concerns that lie behind all the printable novelistic metaphors. When the Goncourts and their famous friends get together for a chat, instead of just talking about who batted their eyelashes at whom last night, they are more likely to wax lyrical about

the strange and unique beauty of the face of any woman – even the commonest whore – who reaches her climax: the indefinable look which comes into her eyes, the delicate character which her features take on, the angelic, almost sacred expression which one sees on the faces of the dying and which suddenly appears on hers at the moment of the little death.

la singulière et originale beauté du visage de toute femme qui jouit—même chez la dernière gadoue—, de ce je ne sais quoi qui vient à ses yeux, de cet affiné que prennent les lignes de sa figure, de l'angélique qui y monte, du caractère presque sacré que revêt le visage des mourants qui s'y voit soudain sous l'apparence de la « petite mort ».

(An idea expressed in almost identical terms, incidentally, more than 150 years later in Nicholson Baker's The Fermata.) Or about their aversion to the ‘oriental practice’ of women shaving their pubic hair:

‘It must look like a priest's chin,’ said Saint-Victor.

It is all amazing stuff. The Goncourts are alert to the best gossip, the most entertaining and revealing anecdotes; their keen sense that they are underappreciated geniuses drives a lot of their observations of the people around them who are (as they see it) getting the success that they, the Goncourts, deserve. This is lucky for us, because it keeps them deeply interested in the artists around them to the very end.

The most prominent of these is Zola, who first pops up in the journals as an unknown fan. His prodigious work ethic and knack for publicity soon means that he is getting all the glory, and all the money, of being the leader of the new ‘Naturalist’ movement. The Goncourts reckon, not without some reason, that he lifted most of his best ideas from them, and they duly note down all the examples they can find. But they're impressed despite themselves at how good he is with the press; as Zola cheerfully confesses,

‘I have a certain taste for charlatanism…I consider the word Naturalism as ridiculous as you do, but I shall go on repeating it over and over again, because you have to give new things new names for the public to think that they are new...’

The attitude of all concerned towards women is shocking, especially in the early years (Edmond does mature quite a lot towards the end, benefitting from a close and gossipy friendship with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte that was clearly very important to him). The women that get discussed tend to be gaupes ‘trollops’, gueuses ‘sluts’ or gadoues ‘whores’; sometimes translator Robert Baldick even renders filles ‘girls’ as ‘tarts’, which, given the tone, is not unreasonable. The brothers confess somewhere that neither of them has really been in love for more than a few days at a time, and their deepest emotion is always reserved for each other. Edmond's description of his brother's eventual death from syphilis is heart-breaking: ‘This morning he was unable to remember a single title among the books he has written.’

And death does loom pretty large over parts of the journal, which covers such upheavals as the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the suppression of the Commune – but the Goncourts' eye is always on individual responses, picturesque incident, personal idiosyncrasies.

Neither of them ever marries, although Edmond thinks about it a few times after his brother has gone. He tries to let down gently the few women that approach him. Eventually, in a passage that's somehow both creepy and moving, he confides that he's never really got over his first erotic experience as a young boy, when he was staying in his cousin's house:

One morning […] I went into their bedroom without knocking. And I went in just as my cousin, her head thrown back, her knees up, her legs apart and her bottom raised on a pillow, was on the point of being impaled [enfourchée] by her husband. There was a swift movement of the two bodies, in which my cousin's pink bottom disappeared so quickly beneath the sheets that I might have thought it had been a hallucination…. But the vision remained with me. And until I met Mme Charles, that pink bottom on a pillow with a scalloped border was the sweet, exciting image that appeared to me every night, before I went to sleep, beneath my closed eyelids.

The Journal amounts to an argument that what matters in life is sex, death and literature – only the characters illustrating this are not fictional creations but rather Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Degas, Barbey d'Aurevilley, Huysmans, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and Turgenev. It's not only glorious and life-affirming, it's also very moving because even while Edmond rages against how his literary works have been overlooked, the reader is increasingly aware that this journal is going to be everything that they hoped for their novels, and more.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

A talent they obviously had. I would rather read half a page of the Goncourts on Zola than a hundred pages of Zola himself. Indeed right now I feel I'd rather read half a page of the Goncourts on anything than almost anything else. Warwick
People died differently in the nineteenth century, and they took a long time doing it. The appalling deaths described in the Goncourt Journal are enough to make you get down on your knees and thank God and Pasteur for antibiotics. Henri Murger, author of the source novel for La Bohème, contracted something called ‘senile gangrene’ and literally rotted to pieces; when his attendants tried to trim his moustache, his lip came off. The journalist Robert Caze punctured his liver in a duel and spent months dying in a fourth-floor apartment. And then there’s Jules de Goncourt himself, who by his late thirties was showing symptoms of advanced syphilis: memory loss, aphasia, paralysis and dementia, each stage being scrupulously recorded by his brother in the journal they had shared.

Why do I keep coming back, year after year, to this cynical, malicious, death-haunted book? Or did I just answer my own question? And while I’m on the subject, why are all my favourite books cynical, malicious and death-haunted? Why are they so freaking French, in other words? But let’s not talk about that now.

You know how they say every generation thinks it discovered sex? Well, maybe it would be equally true to say that every generation thinks it invented modernity. Already the fashions and gadgetry of the 90s—remember flannel shirts? The Discman? The ‘information superhighway’?—must seem ineffably lame to the smug fifteen-year-olds I see on the subway blasting that hippity hop racket out of their so-called ‘cellular telephones’.

On the evidence of the Goncourt Journal, though, the signifiers of hipness—irony, urbanity, a disaffected pose—were well in place long before Lou Reed first put on sunglasses and a sneer. Historically speaking, the brothers may have been stranded among the plush and gaslights of the Second Empire, but spiritually they were already living in their own private twentieth century. It’s not included in this translation, but there’s a passage in the original where the Goncourts and a bunch of their Boho friends are sitting around and bitching about how disgustingly modern they feel. When someone or other disagrees, good old Théophile Gautier gets up and declares himself so modern he wants to puke.

That’s another thing about the journal: it’s funny. The Goncourts knew all the leading writers of the day and used to host glorified piss-ups for them at a chi-chi restaurant in Paris. So you had all these impossibly witty guys hanging out and totally burning each other over oysters and champagne. You get the impression the Goncourts spent the whole night jotting one-liners down on napkins and muttering to themselves, ‘Oh man, this is gold.’

And what did they talk about, these assembled geniuses? Women, mostly. Sure, every once in a while there’d be a screaming match about prose style, but they always came back to women. Women and sex. It’s almost sweet, in a pervy, French sort of way. (At one point, Zola confesses that he fantasizes about pubescent girls: ‘Yes, it frightens me sometimes…I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.’)

With Jules’ death in 1870, some of the youthful piss and vinegar goes out of the journal, but if Edmond was a little more decorous than his brother, he was definitely the bitchier of the two. I don’t think I’ve read anything as eloquently catty as this tremendous putdown of Hippolyte Taine and his wife:

The stupid walk of that potbellied clergyman, with his sly, hypocritical gaze hidden behind his spectacles, and the swarthy, unhealthy ugliness of the horrifying wife, who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink, make a truly dreadful sight for the eyes of an aesthete.

I have no idea what a diseased silkworm might look like, but it sounds really, really mean.

I’ve nattered on shamelessly but I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey just how awesome the journal is. That’s the problem with trying to talk about a book that’s a whole lot smarter and funnier than you are: it ends up judging you. Buck ( )

fun little book.
I thought Jules’s narration was more colorful than Edmond’s.
I’ve a certain satisfaction in knowing that Zola was just as obnoxious a person as he was a writer. ( )

Hands-down the most entertaining book I've read all year. You need this in your life if you have any interest at all in French literature, the life of the mind, the creative process, or Gallic bitching on a monumental scale. Especially the last one.

Every page, and I mean every page, of this book contains one or more of the following:

1. A perfectly-polished aphorism;
2. An astonishing anecdote about a famous writer, or painter, or member of royalty;
3. A worm's-eye view of some major historical event;
4. A jaw-dropping insight into the ubiquity of nineteenth-century misogyny

…or all four. The nature of the Goncourts' social circle means that even the most Twitter-like entry of daily banality becomes interesting (‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert’), but more to the point there is so much here of the real life that never found its way into the fiction of the time. Reading this feels like finally finding out what all those characters in nineteenth-century novels, with their contrived misunderstandings and drawing-room spats, were really thinking about – the salacious concerns that lie behind all the printable novelistic metaphors. When the Goncourts and their famous friends get together for a chat, instead of just talking about who batted their eyelashes at whom last night, they are more likely to wax lyrical about

the strange and unique beauty of the face of any woman – even the commonest whore – who reaches her climax: the indefinable look which comes into her eyes, the delicate character which her features take on, the angelic, almost sacred expression which one sees on the faces of the dying and which suddenly appears on hers at the moment of the little death.

(An idea expressed in almost identical terms, incidentally, more than 150 years later in Nicholson Baker's The Fermata.) Or about their aversion to the ‘oriental practice’ of women shaving their pubic hair:

‘It must look like a priest's chin,’ said Saint-Victor.

It is all amazing stuff. The Goncourts are alert to the best gossip, the most entertaining and revealing anecdotes; their keen sense that they are underappreciated geniuses drives a lot of their observations of the people around them who are (as they see it) getting the success that they, the Goncourts, deserve. This is lucky for us, because it keeps them deeply interested in the artists around them to the very end.

The most prominent of these is Zola, who first pops up in the journals as an unknown fan. His prodigious work ethic and knack for publicity soon means that he is getting all the glory, and all the money, of being the leader of the new ‘Naturalist’ movement. The Goncourts reckon, not without some reason, that he lifted most of his best ideas from them, and they duly note down all the examples they can find. But they're impressed despite themselves at how good he is with the press; as Zola cheerfully confesses,

‘I have a certain taste for charlatanism…I consider the word Naturalism as ridiculous as you do, but I shall go on repeating it over and over again, because you have to give new things new names for the public to think that they are new...’

The attitude of all concerned towards women is shocking, especially in the early years (Edmond does mature quite a lot towards the end, benefitting from a close and gossipy friendship with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte that was clearly very important to him). The brothers confess somewhere that neither of them has really been in love for more than a few days at a time, and their deepest emotion is always reserved for each other. Edmond's description of his brother's eventual death from syphilis is heart-breaking: ‘This morning he was unable to remember a single title among the books he has written.’ And death does loom pretty large over parts of the journal, which covers such upheavals as the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the suppression of the Commune – but the Goncourts' eye is always on individual responses, picturesque incident, personal idiosyncrasies.

Neither of them ever marries, although Edmond thinks about it a few times after his brother has gone. He tries to let down gently the few women that approach him. Eventually, in a passage that's somehow both creepy and moving, he confides that he's never really got over his first erotic experience as a young boy, when he was staying in his cousin's house:

One morning […] I went into their bedroom without knocking. And I went in just as my cousin, her head thrown back, her knees up, her legs apart and her bottom raised on a pillow, was on the point of being impaled by her husband. There was a swift movement of the two bodies, in which my cousin's pink bottom disappeared so quickly beneath the sheets that I might have thought it had been a hallucination…. But the vision remained with me. And until I met Mme Charles, that pink bottom on a pillow with a scalloped border was the sweet, exciting image that appeared to me every night, before I went to sleep, beneath my closed eyelids.

The Journal amounts to an argument that what matters in life is sex, death and literature – only the characters illustrating this are not fictional creations but rather Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Degas, Barbey d'Aurevilley, Huysmans, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and Turgenev. It's not only glorious and life-affirming, it's also very moving because even while Edmond rages against how his literary works have been overlooked, the reader is increasingly aware that this journal is going to be everything that they hoped for their novels, and more.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

A talent they obviously had. I would rather read half a page of the Goncourts on Zola than a hundred pages of Zola himself. Indeed right now I feel I'd rather read half a page of the Goncourts on anything than almost anything else. ( )

I started reading this as research, and immediately found myself taking a distaste to the petty, bitchy, jealous, and frequently mean-spirited Goncourt brothers. Then I got to the section on Jules' death... then the war... then the siege... I've rarely read anything so heartbreaking. I had always heard about the siege, "they had to eat the animals in the zoo." That by itself is striking enough, but I don't think I'd ever fully imagined it until I read Edmond's funny/painful description of a butcher selling off chunks of elephant. ( )