|
Hello, I'm already looking forward to our June selection for the Virtual Book Club...a legendary novel that will make for the perfect pre- "Summer Read": Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac! We will discuss this beloved classic on Friday, June 7th at 6pm Eastern Time. Please note that this class meets on FRIDAY, not on our usual Thursday time.
Few names in French and European literature are as illustrious as Balzac's. Born in 1799, he would go on to become one of the most innovative and prolific pioneers in the history of the modern novel, and his influence would extend over such celebrated names as Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, and Henry James, to name only a few. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate just what a productive literary force Balzac was in his brief lifetime (he died in 1850 at the age of 51). His oeuvres complètes, complete works, consist of nearly a hundred novels and novellas, an interlinked series that was collected in La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), a vast multi-volume work that depicts French society during the Restoration and July Monarchy.
Balzac himself was quite the character, and his extravagant lifestyle and habits fueled the myths surrounding him. He reputedly wrote everyday from 1am to 8am if not longer, drank black coffee nonstop and by the "bucketful," and gorged on massive meals that might include oysters, stuffed turkeys and chickens, sheep’s kidneys, and of course imposing desserts.
Père Goriot from 1835 is one of Balzac's best-known novels and a representative work of the Comédie humaine. The story of a father's excessive and ill-advised love for his self-regarding daughters, Père Goriot is also a ruthless critique of the power-hungry and status-obsessed world of early 19th-century Parisian high society. The novel features the character that would become central to Balzac's project in the Comédie humaine: Eugène de Rastignac, a young, ambitious, talented law student of noble origins but limited financial resources who is intent on rising through the ranks of French society even as he realizes that it may cost him everything, including his soul. Early in the novel, Balzac masterfully suggests how Rastignac's glittering career prospects, and his family's hopes for him, will drive the arc of his novel:
[Rastignac] belonged to the number of young men who know as children that their parents’ hopes are centered on them, and deliberately prepare themselves for a great career, subordinating their studies from the first to this end, carefully watching the indications of the course of events, calculating the probable turn that affairs will take, that they may be the first to profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and the skill with which he managed to introduce himself into the salons of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of truth which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling condition of things... (trans. Marriage)
There are multiple English translations of Père Goriot available to you. I can recommend both the one by Ellen Marriage in the Barnes and Noble Classics Series, and a more recent one by A. J. Krailsheimer in the Oxford World Classics, which you can purchase directly from the VBC Bookshop at Bookshop.org (just click the icon for the novel under "Virtual Book of the Month"). Finally, I've included a Reader's Guide to help you get inside this fascinating work.
Buona lettura / happy reading!
Joseph
| 
