Honore de Balzac wrote so much that his oeuvre seems almost impenetrable – where does one start with the 91 works that make up La Comedie Humaine? Where does one start the Grand Canyon? Is there a particularly good spot to drop in on the Great Wall of China? You hear a bunch of names that are also titles – Cousine Bette, Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot – alongside some names that aren’t titles – Rastignac, Vautrin – and read somewhere that there isn’t even a definite count of how many characters are in the books (somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000+) and it all seems a bit much. And a bit much is a perfect descriptor, it turns out, for Balzac, who writes with an unmatched authorial zeal, his narrator at once telling a story and reveling in the act of telling it. Frequent asides and interjections abound, and he holds back nothing rhetorically, right from the first page:
Civilization’s high-riding chariot, like the believer-crushing car of the idol Juggernaut, barely slows down when it comes to a heart a bit harder to crack, and if such a heart gets in the way it’s pretty quickly smashed, and on goes the glorious march. Which is what you’ll do, too, you who are right now holding this book in your fair white hand, you who sink down in your soft easy chair, saying to yourself: Maybe this book is going to be fun. And then, after you’ve read all about Père Goriot’s miserable secrets, you’ll have yourself a good dinner and blamer your indifference on the author, scolding him for exaggeration, accusing him of having waxed poetic. Ah, but let me tell you: this drama is not fictional, it’s not a novel. All is true – so true you’ll be able to recognize everything that goes into it in your own life, perhaps even in your own heart.1
Père Goriot is the one I happened to find at a used bookstore some years ago, and so it was my introduction to Balzac the avuncular realist. He is a bridge between the romantic 18th century and the realist 19th that he essentially invented; Flaubert and his other successors just ironed out the Balzacian ruffles in the realist novel.
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