Product Description

About the Series: Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations-from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory-as well as a bibliography and, in most cases, a chronology of the author's life and work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #303365 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

About the Author
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was born in Tours. By the time of his death, he had written over one hundred novels, novellas, and plays, all the while working as a journalist. Colonel Chabert is one of the "Scenes from Private Life," which is a part of Balzac's well-known life-long project, La Comedie Humaine.

Peter Brooks (Editor) is Tripp Professor of Humanities at Yale University, where he teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and French. He has written extensively about the nineteenth-century novel, French and English. His books include: The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess; Reading for the Plot, Body Work, and Psychoanalysis and Storytelling.

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He is the translator of many works, including Gargantua and Pantagruel (awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize), Père Goriot, Beowulf, and the five romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

Customer Reviews

Caffeine Inspired Realism
You know right away that de Balzac is an author of realism when, at the start of the book, he takes you on a five page tour of the first floor of Madame Vauquer's Parisian boarding house. One immediately realizes that sanitation standards for such accommodations were seriously lacking. The dining room "table [was] covered with oilcloth so greasy that, if a waggish diner wanted to, he could write his name in it, using nothing more than his finger as a pen." We then quickly learn about the overwhelming contrast between the boarders' life style and that of aristocratic Parisian society..

The protagonists of the story are Eugene, a young and poor law student, and old man Goriot, the aging father of two narcissistic daughters who live in the upper strata of Parisian society. While many mediocre authors manage to make cardboard characters out of real people, Balzac has the task of making cardboard people real. Eugene is invited to a ball held by his cousin, a countess, and falls in love with the beautiful people and their world. He is determined to be a part of it. Vautrin, a fellow boarder, a wise street philosopher, and prototype for modern day CEOs, tells Eugene that money is everything. Eugene promptly appropriates every cent of his family's savings to buy the clothes that will allow him to blend in with the aristocracy. Soon he meets Goriot's aristocratic daughters and falls in love with one of them. These two grasping young ladies, in their need for the necessities in life (fine clothing and jewelry), have taken so much money from their formerly wealthy father that he now lives in abject poverty, sleeping on a moldy straw mattress in Madame Vauquer's boarding house.

By now I am sure that you have discerned Balzac's attitude toward the socially elite. He has no love for people who are famous for being famous. We should resist the urge, though, to shake our heads in wonder over these strange 19th century Parisians. If Balzac were alive today I am sure he would loosen his poison pen on our own celebrities whose meaningless lives are constantly being spotlighted during their fifteen minutes of fame. Balzac is a lively writer. He supposedly drank huge amounts of coffee every day, and his writing often seems to be the product of a highly caffeinated mind. If the highly stylized writing of some Victorian era writers numbs your brain you might want to dip into Balzac.

I strongly recommend that you consider purchasing the Norton Critical Edition of this novel. It provides an additional 150 pages of commentary on Balzac, this novel, and his oeuvre in general; an extra dollar or two well spent.

The quality of Balzac
This work is considered one of Balzac's masterpieces. It is written with this kind of energy and power the same kind of literary ambition that seems uniquely his. Balzac as a writer has a drive and strength , and this is felt in his descriptions of character as well as in the force of his plots. Here we have a variation of Lear, with two ungrateful daughters doing - in the over- solicitous father for whom the daughters are all. One of Balzac's central themes is obsession, the fixing on one particular object as one's life aim or meaning and giving all to it. For old Goriot it is his daughters, as for Balzac himself it is his ambition to capture the whole of his society in his novels. But the Balzac worlds and this in itself another long subject are also worlds in which traditional values are in clash with values of social climbing money grabbers as exemplified by Goriot's daughters. Balzac's works are filled with great dynamism and are for many one of the great peaks of world - literature. At least some of his works should be read by one who wishes to have a taste of the best that has been thought and said. I would only add my own personal reservation. That the energy and greed of so many of the characters in his world , has left me feeling a bit detached from them. I can admire this Literature but I have never especially loved the world or characters presented in it.

Peerless
Norton has done a really fine job on its critical edition of PERE GORIOT. The translation is especially good, vivid and direct. The commentaries are well chosen and organized. Of particular interest are appreciations of Balzac by writers who were influenced by him, including Zola, Proust, Baudelaire and Henry James. Henry James' take on Balzac is particularly interesting. Written in James' late style, the essay is sometimes inscrutable, but still, James, as always when he writes on writers and writing, offers great insight into Balzac and his oeuvre.

Highly recommended.