Product Description

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6654617 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

From the Inside Flap
"Balzac [was] the master unequalled in the art of painting humanity as it exists in modern society," wrote George Sand. "He searched and dared everything."

Written between 1837 and 1843, Lost Illusions reveals, perhaps better than any other of Balzac's ninety-two novels, the nature and scope of his genius. The story of Lucien Chardon, a young poet from Angoulême who tries desperately to make a name for himself in Paris, is a brilliantly realistic and boldly satirical portrait of provincial manners and aristocratic life. Handsome and ambitious but naïve, Lucien is patronized by the beau monde as represented by Madame de Bargeton and her cousin, the formidable Marquise d'Espard, only to be duped by them. Denied the social rank he thought would be his, Lucien discards his poetic aspirations and turns to hack journalism; his descent into Parisian low life ultimately leads to his own death.

"Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense," noted V. S. Pritchett, one of his several biographers. Another, André Maurois, concluded: "Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius."

This Modern Library edition presents the translation by Kathleen Raine.

From the Back Cover

The Modern Library of the World's
Best Books

"All Balzac's characters are endowed with the zest for life with which he himself was animated. All his fabrications are
as intensely colored as dreams. From the highest ranks of the aristocracy to the lowest dregs of society, all the actors in his
Comedie are more eager for life, more energetic and cunning in their struggles, more patient in misfortune, more greedy in pleasure, more angelic in devotion than they are in the comedy of the real world. In a word, everyone in Balzac has genius....Every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will."

--Charles Baudelaire

Customer Reviews

Sacre bleu, the man can write!
As much as I enjoyed Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions is the kind of a literary work that lets you peer into the soul of a great mind and dwell there. Just as Lucien was Balzac, the lost poet, David Sechard, the printer, is also Balzac the craftsman in real life: he bought a print shop in Paris to print his own novels. Sechard is much like the scientist in the Quest of the Absolute, except that David ultimately finds himself through his invention and the inventor in The Quest becomes lost to his own monomania. As Balzac wrote of Lucien: "He's not a poet, this young man: he's a serial novel." And so it's time to find out what happens to Lucien after this novel in his return to Paris. The characters of his novels keep reappearing in scenes from one novel to the next, which is wonderful. However, they seem to change as one sees them through different eyes. Delightful young Rastignac in Pere Goriot becomes a rather unscrupulous mean-spirited character in Lost Illusions. Balzac has built an entire society of his characters and as varied as they are, they are all also him and show the great diversity and depth of his personality and sensitivity. Like Galsworthy, Balzac wanted to build an interconnected society of characters who are so human that it's easy to understand why they behave as they do. The realism is striking and magnificent and always rings true. Balzac works hard despite the realism to spin out of every hardship a redemption and out of every malignity a comic side that's all too human. The comedy and irony are rich in Balzac in his passionate account of life in Paris in high society and the challenges that it thrusts upon every ideal. This is the best work of Balzac that I have read so far out of four novels of his. It's such great writing, and the energy of the translator can make a difference, that Balzac keeps one coming back for more. But the writing and wit and wisdom are so extraordinary, I am happy to accommodate him. Anyone who has ever aspired to write and publish prose in New York will identify with Blazac's Lucien: Lost Illusions is a novel that aspiring writers especially may find intriguing.

great, but very very very heavy
Endlessly fascinating, but what a painful experience it is to read this book. It epitomises Balzac's greatest themes: the provincial trying to make good in Paris, the wreckage in the wake of unbridled ambition, and the complexity and brutality of machinations that few come to understand. Alas, while there are more good guys in this Balzac novel than others, in the latter half of the book the vast majority of them still streak towards financial disaster and their own obscure miseries as they do in most of his novels. But what a great way to learn about what people used to do in those sumptuous chateaux you see all over France and in those splendid buildings in Paris! It is utterly spellbinding and a wonderful view of history.

If you like Balzac, and I love him, the pleasures are akin to addiction: you know what you are getting into when you uncork that bottle, but you just can't stop yourself and it's great while it lasts. Every time I crack one of these novels, my wife rolls her eyes because she knows I am going to rant about the hopelessness, foolishness, and pain of these characters over the next few weeks.

What can I say? The 19th Century was the century of the novel and this is one of its best. Balzac turns the bitterest pessimism into the highest art. Just be forewarned: you need to have a strong stomach to get through it.

A Contrast of Genius, or: Bright Lights, Big City
Alongside his current and future contemporaries, Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust, Honore de Balzac is considered to be the preeminent French author of the 19th century. Fabulous, larger-than-life, Balzac was a man of fertile talent and extreme contrasts, whose proficiency with the pen was matched only by his prolificacy of his appetites. A clown, a genius, a glutton and a monk: Balzac burned brightly with the Promethean Gift, and left behind an enormous body of work - some ninety-two novels - all loosely interconnected in theme and character(s). To accomplish this, he worked manic-style from the hours of midnight to six in the morning, scribbling furiously by candlelight and swilling copious amounts of black coffee, retaining the sexual urge tantric-style while cultivating a reputation as a ladies' man and legendary great lover (. . . as I said, a man of extreme contrasts). The eventually result of this effort is entitled Le Comedie Humaine [The Human Comedy], an almost-encyclopaedic opus that paints a relatively accurate portrait of Balzac's time and setting - a true French *milieu* - and easily compares to the output of his literary contemporaries, by way of both qualitative exertion and sheer talent.

*Lost Illusions* chronicles the trials and triumphs of two potential geniuses, Lucien Rubempre and David Sechard, men of steadfast friendship, common ideal and altogether differing personality. Lucien is the handsome, debonair poet-dreamer, a wordsmith-wannabe of vast ambition and dubious moral fortitude, who envisions all existence bound up in the invisible perimeters of "art" to the exclusion of pressing realities; this leads, of course, to the misery and consternation of those of his closest intimacy. David, in contrast, is a plain, hard working, abstract-thinking inventor, the simpleton-savant forced to endure continual ridicule and poverty as he strives to streamline certain basic elements of the printing business for the benefit of future generations. The contrasting development of these two men - for better and for worse - reveals the true path one must take (i.e. disciplined WORK), and the many temptations one should avoid (sloth, sensual over-abandonment, sham-intellectualism), in finding culmination for the burgeoning talent, in realizing and applying the genius-drive. . . at least according to Balzac's not-so-humble opinion.

The novel begins very much like most 19th century literature, with the first fifty or so pages devoted almost exclusively to describing the environment in which the forthcoming drama shall ensue, and in detailing the history and general character of the main participants therein. These necessities thus scribed, Balzac launches into the narrative with his usual vigor: his technique includes a slow-boil development of tension/conflict; a scathing portrayal of the high society; reflective asides and cultural digressions; humorous episodes coupled with a smattering of violence, the latter element confined mostly to the psychological. This structure is common to a Balzac novel, and in *Lost Illusions* it is achieved with page-turning skill; even when the pace flags, the infectious energy implicit in the text and overall construction helps to buoy the reader across Balzac's vast, oceanic theme-excursions.

To be honest, *Lost Illusions* is one of those books where, paradoxically, 'the less said the better;' it is so good that, in my opinion, its delights and secret treasures should be discovered by the innocent, diligent reader - the eventual impact of the novel becoming all the greater. But I suppose a few tidbits are necessary for this sort of review...thus:

Fed up with being a tortured poet among philistines, Lucien Rebempre leaves the small-town constraints of his native Angouleme for the bright lights and big city splendor of gay Paree. There he is quickly seduced by the glittering illusions of bourgeois society, and almost as quickly thrown down to languish amidst the common rabble. For some time our 'hero' pines and abstract-pontificates, juggling his dream of artistic immortality with the more immediate desire for monetary wealth/social recognition, slowly but ever-so-surely capitulating toward the fantasy-chimera of the latter. Lucien, with his flower sonnets and unfinished manuscript _An Archer of Charles IX_, begins his 'quest' as a fresh-faced, starry-eyed enthusiast of human potential; in short, a typical example of naïve ambition as yet unhampered by the crushing weight of repeat-failure and/or the angst-miasma of the cynical perspective. Lucien's eventual abandonment of the higher ideals of art for the quick fame of journalism seems almost inevitable given his unstable character, and it gives the author unrestrained motive to rant and rave, via literary form. It is obvious that Balzac, who toiled in the fickle trade of news-shaping for some considerable time, had an axe to grind; and his blow-by-blow critique of the business - its hypocrisies, desperations, vacant platitudes and absolute corruption - is all the more affecting because it is witnessed by the demoralized, disillusioned Lucien: his 'quest' has taken him from the Elysian Fields of "pure" Glory to the sordid pits of a fraudulent Hell, a vast, soulless Perdition for the artistically condemned.

Indisputably one of Balzac's finest novels, *Lost Illusions* is where the casual reader should venture after reading *Pere Goirot* and possibly *The Black Sheep*. Balzac's characters often reappear, in some form or another, over the course of his opus: principle to this volume are the roguish personalities of Rastignac and Vautrin/Jacque Collins, both of which are introduced in *Pere Goirot*. The former is somewhat inconsequential to the novel as a whole, but the latter arrives at a fortuitous moment, afflicts a massive change to one of the leading protagonists, and comes to dominate *Lost Illusion*'s inferior sequel, *A Harlot High and Low*. His speech about mankind and its necessary illusions - in itself a harrowing disillusionment to the already shattered reader-participant - culminates all of Balzac's themes, digressions, character arcs: he tells it like it is in a fashion that few authors of this era dare dream - or even conceive - of attempting.

Highly Recommended.