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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

The Very Best Of Honore De Balzac
The Very Best Of Honore De Balzac

Author: Honore Balzac de

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789386450685

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The fifty stories that balzac wrote during his working life display all the qualities of his novels, and many of them feature the characters that throng thecomedie humaine. Nevertheless, while they do offer an interesting counterpoint to the great novels, the stories as themselve.

The Bureaucrats
The Bureaucrats

Author: Honore De Balzac

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1993-12-14

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0810109875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Bureaucrats (Les Employes) stands out in Balzac's immense Human Comedy by concentrating precisely and penetratingly on a distinctive "modern" institution: France's state bureaucracy. Rabourdin, aided by his unscrupulous wife, attempts to reorganize and streamline the entire system. Rabourdin's plan will halve the government's size while doubling its revenue. When the plan is leaked, Rabourdin's rival—an utter incompetent—gains the overwhelming support of the frightened and desperate body of low-ranking functionaries. The novel contains the recognizable themes of Balzac's work: obsessive ambition, conspiracy and human pettiness, and a melodramatic struggle between the social good and the evils of folly and stupidity. It is also an unusual, dramatized analysis of a developing political institution and its role in shaping social class and mentality.

Balzac
Balzac

Author: Graham Robb

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13: 9780393313871

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Author: Sijie Dai

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 037541309X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.