The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Tried reading Pere Goriot recently and just couldn't connect with it. Unlike Flaubert, where the Realist emphasis on details enriched the book, I thought they made for plodding reading with Balzac.

I haven't read Père Goriot yet, but I read Eugenie Grandet two years ago and loved it. The details describing Eugenie's father's miserliness were astounding.

Works of Honore de Balzac appears to include all of the published works of Balzac, including short stories and plays. It is arranged according to the various sub-groups of The Human Comedy. There is also a section called "Resources" which includes The Criticism (Henry James and D.H. Lawrence among them) and The Biographies. I have yet to read any of this supplemental material. I have read only a few of Balzac's titles. I am not a Balzac scholar by any means, and cannot attest to the quality of the translations. I have enjoyed thoroughly those titles I have read and intend to read many more of them.

I got this for my Kindle, but I'm guessing it is available formated for other ereaders as well.

Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honore'de Balzac is a recent contribution to all things Balzac which I hope to get to sooner rather than later.

Dagny wrote: "Unlike some authors, translations of Balzac circa 1900 are quite good. "

Very encouraging - thank you.

Dagny, you commented in the Roman Fleuve thread, that you have read all of Balzac's novels. I can't imagine this "just happened", so did you have a grand design? How did you go about it?

Dagny wrote: "Actually, I've read through The Human Comedy twice. The first was when my New Zealand buddy John and I prepared the etexts for Project Gutenberg. One of us typed and the other proofed. The second t..."

Thanks for that work, even if I haven't used it personally. Wonderful gift to the world.

Dagny wrote: "Actually, I've read through The Human Comedy twice. The first was when my New Zealand buddy John and I prepared the etexts for Project Gutenberg. One of us typed and the other proofed. The second t..."

Thank you - both for the links and for your Gutenberg work. While I haven't downloaded Balzac specifically, I have used Gutenberg a number of times and appreciate the effort on behalf of the rest of us.

Thanks to Dagny for a recommended reading order in the blog mentioned in Post #8.

I used this order and the wiki site for La Comedie Humaine to create a spreadsheet available to anyone with the link. The spreadsheet includes blog order, year pub, title, story/novel (story less than 100 pages, my definition), and group (structure).

You can view the spreadsheet here: Balzac spreadsheet, where there are 4 tabs presorted on blog order, year pub, story/novel and group. Feel free to email it to yourself as an attachment for further viewing and/or sorts.

Dagny, many of the GR descriptions of Balzac's works are nothing more than a reiteration of Balzac having written the Comedie Humaine. I see the blog has true descriptions, some of them written by you (all of them?). Would you mind those descriptions being incorporated here, with a link to the blog as attribution?

Ha! Yes, as I click "more" on many of them, I descend into spoilerism. But I think I can help others at GR by extracting a paragraph, which surely is better than

By the French author, who, along with Flaubert, is generally regarded as a founding-father of realism in European fiction. His large output of works, collectively entitled The Human Comedy (La Comidie Humaine), consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels and essays) and 48 unfinished works. His stories are an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. They are placed in a variety of settings, with characters reappearing in multiple stories.

that serves for the description of many of the series.

Thanks, Dagny - off to work now! ;-)