How long does it take to read Bête Humaine?
Bête Humaine by Émile Zola takes about 7 hours 37 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Part of Les Rougon-Macquart
Previous: La Bête humaine Next: L'Argent
About 7 hours 37 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1890. 415 pages, about 114,125 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 41 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 37 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 40 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bête humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context. - Back cover.
Subjects: Translated into English, French fiction, Social conditions, Fiction, Long Now Manual for Civilization, Murder
