Product Description

In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur lives the miser Grandet with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugenie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. "Eugenie Grandet" is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comedie humaine cycle, his magnificent panorama of post-Revolutionary French life, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6765742 in Books
• Published on: 1956-01-01
• Original language: French
• Binding: Hardcover
• 252 pages

Review
`a classic novel which makes your hair stand on end and your ribs tickle with hilarity` Daily Mail

'This new translation of Balzac's 1833 classic is modern and absolutely gripping. I've never read such a subtle and painful study of a miser and his family. This book is a treat and fascinatingly unlike anything we have in our own literature.' Bristol Evening Post

Language Notes
Text: English
Original Language: French

From the Inside Flap
Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare, classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father's hysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. One of the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-century French provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whom nothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of the human animal to understand and illuminate its own condition.

Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R. Jameson

Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. His publications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures of the Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming.

Customer Reviews

Excellent literature, period.
This is the extremely sad and powerfully written story of Eugenie Grandet, a true heroine of modern literature (yes, modern). In the town of Saumur, M. Grandet is a wine merchant, a miser in full. This is a despicable man, but like good characters in literature, he has an understandable, if unjustifiable, reason for his behavior. He wants to give his family a perennial financial security. The problem is, that is all he wants for his family. Nothing else matters. So the family leads a monastical life, luxury is forbidden, joy is expensive. Eugenie is a likable but shy young lady, without any knowledge of the world whatsoever. Balzac is just great at creating the environment and mood. You can see the big, old house, the leaves fallen from the trees and rustling in the silent evenings of this town. You can feel the boredom of lifeless life, the long, long afternoons. The avaricious man lecturing everybody for spending like crazy, anguished at every penny spent, regardless of what was bought or consumed.

So, two families are looking forward to having one of their sons married to Eugenie, but Daddy is looking for more wealth, and refuses to share his with these provincial people. Then his brother committs suicide in account of financial trouble, and Grandet's nephew, Charles, comes to town. He and Eugenie fall in love, but there is no chance M. Grandet will accept a marriage with the son of a ruined man. Charles, thus, leaves for the Indies to look for fortune. Someday he'll come back, but things will never be the same. As the years pass, we see Eugenie go on with her dull life, her heart saddened and cold.

Balzac's novel paints an accurate and believable portrait of French society at the time, but it would not have survived if that had been all. As the title of this review states, this work has transcended because it is literature of the higher sort, that which goes directly to the human heart and mind, to situations that do not pass with age, but remain embedded in any society. And because the writer is a master craftsman: Balzac is one of the best. Think of novel and think of Balzac, "competitor with the Civil Records": a rigorous analyst of human, and not only French, society.

The Best Book Ever Written
This is without a doubt one of my absolute favorites. I read La Pere Goriot before I read this one thinking it was great. After reading this I was convinced that Balzac was easily one of the best authors ever.

The story focuses around the members of the Grandet family. The Father is a miser the likes of which you have never seen, a cruel man willing to ruin his family in his pursuit of money and gold. He owns a wine field in the small town and within the first fifty pages he is already ripping the town off. Mme. Grandet is the poor wife who has become used to her husband's pettiness but seems unfulfilled. Eugenie, the daughter is a young girl who has lived a sheltered and restrained life in the enormous house, never realising what the outside world has to offer.

The story is really quite simple. Charles, Mr Grandet's nephew comes to visit the family (his father has killed himself but he doesn't know that until Mr. Grandet shows him the suicide letter.) Eugenie falls in love, the Parisienne fop and the two have a quick love affair, Charles goes away a and promises to return one day so that they may marry, and a lot more which I'm not so silly as to ruin for you.

The story is an extremely sad affair. Eugenie is so wonderfully written that you begin to feel sorry for her position and that she has never really seen true happiness. Overall, a touching book, well worth the read. Much better than many of the other classics out there, believe me.

Balzac is so underated.

One of the Balzac's best novels
I'm a Balzac's french fan.
All the "Human Comedy" is to read. Especially "Eugenie Grandet" is the third in my own classement(After "Le Pere Goriot" and "Le Cousin Pons"). So, I want to convince you : Read, at least these 3 Balzac's novels. After, you will be taken by Balzac and you will read the rest of his novels.
If I have to summarize Balzac in one word it's : "passion".
All the Balzac's novels speak about some aspects of passion : passion in love, passion in paternity or maternity, passion of money, passion of power, passion of science, ...
"Eugenie Grandet" describes particularly passion of money (Eugenie's father), and passion for love (Eugenie).
What is marvelous with Balzac it is his ability to make some of his characters sympathetic even if they are bad (for example Eugenie's father is really a bad man but his passion for money has some emotionnal aspects and the reader can't hate him definitively).