No Book No Life: Online Book Club

The whole title of this book is as below.
(It was too long and didn't fit in the event title):

"Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile,
10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas"
by Marguerite Duras
Introduction by Germaine Bree
<<　 ISBN-10 9780802151117　 >>

paperback @amazon.co.uk
https://amzn.eu/d/dTgGaei
Kindle version @ amazon.com
https://a.co/d/aaWWY8q

Book descriptions from Goodreads.com

In this volume of four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few cental from the park bench couple in "The Square" (1955) to the double love triangle in "10:30 on a Summer Night" (1960), each novel probes the depths and complexities of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.

From Goodreads.com

'in this life, even if you don't ask for much you still end up with bugger all!'
In a run-down quarter of Paris, Gervaise Macquart struggles to earn a living and support her family. She earns a pittance washing other people's dirty clothes in the local washhouse, and dreams of having her own laundry. But in order to start her business she must incur debt, and her feckless husband cannot resist the lure of the Assommoir, the local bar that supplies all the working men with cheap spirits and absinthe. As her money troubles grow, so Gervaise's life begins to spiral out of control, and she is trapped in a vicious web of want and neglect.

The Assommoir is a pivotal novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. In it he lays bare the terrible poverty of the Parisian underclass, living in overcrowded tenements, addicted to drink, a world of squalor, and casual violence. It contains some of Zola's most powerful and graphic writing, unforgettable portrayals of individuals and their environment, and the fine line between self-respect and ruin.

From goodreads.com

'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.'

Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared.

Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster not so much as a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.