Balzac's Lives
Balzac's Lives

Author: Peter Brooks

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1681374501

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Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Eugénie Grandet
Eugénie Grandet

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: Dutton Books

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780460001694

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Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age. Book jacket.

The Thirteen
The Thirteen

Author: Honore de Balzac

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1776538374

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This series of three novellas is unified by an overarching motif: in all three tales, a mysterious secret society known as The Thirteen is at work behind the scenes. The men in the group have pledged eternal loyalty to each other, and if any member ever finds himself in peril, it is the sworn duty of the others to come to his aid. Honore de Balzac uses this premise as a device to explore a wide range of topics, including clashes between different classes of society, doomed romances, and intrigue driven by greed.

Balzac
Balzac

Author: Graham Robb

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13: 9780393313871

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A portrait of the self-destructive French novelist follows Balzac's early literary disappointments, impractical money-making schemes, love affairs, correspondences, and achievements.