The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac
The Human Comedy is Balzac’s multi-volume magnum opus, an interconnected chronicle of modernity in all its splendour and squalor, featuring characters from all facets of society and all walks of life, including lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspirant politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more. The Human Comedy features a variety of short stories in which Balzac is at his most focused and strong. It also contains the vast roomy novels that have had such an influence on Balzac’s numerous literary inheritors, from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to Marcel Proust. This anthology contains nine of these, all freshly translated, and taken together, they offer an unparalleled overview of a great writer’s interests and creativity.
The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac
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This new translation of Balzac’s nine brilliant stories and novellas is a great way to get to know him again. Any writer would find it difficult and be inspired by his ability to draw the reader into the narrative—often a narrative within a narrative. His characters live in a very different society, but their compassion always comes through. To really understand human comedy, spend some time with this author. It’s a little misleading to refer to this as “The Human Comedy” because the stories presented here, which are primarily short stories, only make up a small portion of Balzac’s Human Comedy. Nevertheless, it’s a good collection with some outstanding classics and several difficult-to-find stories.
Most of them feature some sort of passion, obsession, or craziness, and many of them centre on hopeless love.
A blind Venetian musician tells his weird story of a fall from favour, a murder, an adventure, and a buried treasure in the strange adventure story “Facino Cane.” The story has some fantastically long sections of horrifying gothic description. The epic adventure the title character suggests is even more grandiose than the one he tells. The tale comes to a direct, very appropriate end. One of Balzac’s better stories, perhaps.
A young student living in poverty meets his neighbour, an elderly guy who turns out to be… Gobseck, in the fantastic story “Gobseck.” Anastasie de Restaud, née Goriot, the daughter of that character, is described in the early pages as having fallen from grace in some of Balzac’s earlier writings, such as Pere Goriot, which is actually a kind of sequel to this one. Work with a strong focus on the plot and lots of irony and justice.
