Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scathing Expose of the Social Circus, August 18, 2001
The French author Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote nearly a hundred books over the course of his relatively short life. Most are considered part of his incomplete opus titled La Comedie Humaine (the Human Comedy), with reoccurring characters and overlapping themes. The goal of this oeuvre was to create a panoramic view of French society, staring from the Revolution and continuing to the current (mid nineteenth century) age, exploring the aspects of country, city and military life. Balzac believed that just as the differences of heredity and environment produce various species of animals, so did the varying pressures of society produce differentiations among human beings. In the Human Comedy, Balzac attempted to describe and classify these human "species." _Pere Goriot_ is arguably the most famous and artistically successful entry of the opus, a masterful study of a father who sacrifices his wealth and health to assure his two daughters into the hotbed of Parisian high-society. Through the eyes of Rastignac, an impoverished youth eager to gain social success, we see Goriot's maniacal obsession to his "babies," constantly succumbing to their lavish demands and paying off their debts, all the while prevented from being seen in public with them or even visiting their houses. Goriot is deemed unfit company and a threat to the illusion of success, the latter of which being Balzacs central theme for this particular novel: In the whirl of Parisian high-life, it is not so much the individual talent or intelligence or virtue one has that gives him or her a respected standing; instead, the trappings of wealth and the way in which one displays it is the standard and the rule: conspicuous consumerism for the bygone era. And let us gaze upon the technocratic twenty-first-century pyramid of Hollywood and its ilk-with actresses famous solely for the size of their breasts, and psychos killing just to appear on television, and a whole media subculture slavishly devoted to the whims and waste and trials of the celebrity identity, it is easy to see that the game never ends, the rules never really change; in this cyclical social circus, those with the finest illusion garner the highest raves, the chance at longevity, the narcotic of fame. Proof of that ancient adage: how much times change, how much they stay the same This is an amazing book. Highly recommended to the student of life.
|
|
|
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I Am in Hell, and I Have To Stay There.", January 19, 2004
Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novel, "Le Père Goriot," is a novel of strange and fascinating power. As the doorway into his interconnected cycle, La Comédie Humaine, it presents as much welcome to interested readers as Dante's fateful "abandon all hope..." entrance to Hell in the Divine Comedy. "Le Père Goriot" gives us a fallen world, driven by self-interest, where all ties of genuine human feeling seem to be relegated to a no longer existent past, or to the rarely-glimpsed pastoral countryside. Balzac presents the stories of Eugène de Rastignac - a young law student from the southern provinces, Jean-Joachim Goriot - a former pasta merchant who gave all he had as dowry for his two daughters, and Vautrin - a man who lives and works in shadows. Balzac's novel illustrates the lengths and depths that these three, and everyone around them, go to in order to secure even the most fleeting happiness in the moral wasteland of Paris about 4 years after the fall of Napoleon.The novel begins with our introduction to Maison Vauquer, a boarding house with a crumbling plaster statue of Cupid in the yard, which is home and prison to the respectably indigent. Goriot has lived in the Maison Vauquer under the increasingly unsympathetic gaze of Madame Vauquer and her boarders for almost 10 years - wasting away, Goriot has become a figure of fun for the house, coming to be known teasingly as "Old Goriot." His tragic affection for his two well-married daughters, Delphine de Nucingen and Anastasie de Restaud, has driven him out of their homes, and into a state wherein his only joys come from seeing them from afar, and mortgaging what remains of his fortune to assist them in financial difficulties. Into the Maison and Goriot's life comes young Rastignac, whose lack of fortune fuels his desire to enter the fashionable world of Parisian high society. Here, Rastignac meets Vautrin, who offers the youth a possible means to do so - means both underhanded and deadly. One of the novel's great questions is the great Biblical dilemma - what does it profit a man to gain the world if he must lose his soul in the process? The novel's three main characters, but particularly Rastignac, illustrate the dilemma from different vantage points. For Vautrin and Goriot, their choices were made long ago, and Balzac's work with them concerns the results of lives organized around self and others, respectively. The novel's primary concern is with Rastignac, who is continually in the process of weighing his options - in a world in which there is little grey area, will Rastignac opt for a life of good or evil, of self-interest (as with fellow-boarders Mlle. Michonneau and M. Poiret) or service (as with fellow-student Bianchon)? Balzac sets relationships, particularly those concerned with family, up for consideration in the novel. We see bonds created by birth, as well as by social class and wealth; of course, family and money are rarely inseparable, and certainly are not mutually exclusive for the novel's characters. Rastignac is in Paris studying the law only because of the financial sacrifices being made by his family in the country. Rastignac's kinship with Madame de Beauséant provides him with a taste of the seeming luxury of Paris. Victorine de Taillefer, a motherless young girl at the Maison Vauquer, makes a fruitless yearly application to her hard-hearted father, who has disowned her completely. As Rastignac interacts with and becomes part of Goriot's life and that of his fellow-boarders, we are encouraged to consider the role of the family as it relates to society. If family is Balzac's basic social unit, then how do we regard the family constituted by Goriot and his daughters? The one made up of the "guests" of the boarding house? That of Vautrin's Ten Thousand Society? I have barely scratched the surface of Balzac's novel. Its engagements - literary, sociological, and moral, are extensive. Balzac's engagements with literary and philosophical models, from Shakespeare to Rousseau, are worth taking notice of, as are his proposed "three attitudes of men toward the world: obedience, struggle, and revolt." For a novel with seemingly clear moral polarities, it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains in "Le Père Goriot." Though the novel is by no means a simple satire, getting swept up in the novel's overt sentimentality may say as much about the reader as it does about the novel's characters and situations. Balzac's anonymous narrator offers continually biased judgments, which can cloud the reader's ability to remain objective. Any way one reads it, "Le Père Goriot" is a terrific novel - and the invitation to enter Balzac's uninviting world is well worth accepting.
|
|
|
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Parting of the Mist, November 21, 2000
In May 2000 I stood hat in hand at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris paying my respects to a giant named Honore de Balzac. His masterpiece, PERE GORIOT, has resonated across over 30 years since that happy moment in 1968 when I first sat down to dine at Mme de Vauquer's boarding house, since I first heard the whispered confidences of Mme de Nucingen and the sighs of the Duchesse de Langeais, and since I first ran into that master criminal Vautrin. Balzac was at the same time an extraordinarily ambitious man and one who knew the limits of fame and fortune. For years he chased his Polish countess, and no sooner did he win and marry her than he fell ill and died. I would like to think that there was a smirk on his face as he saw the irony: He was himself a character in a Balzac novel, a composite of all his characters -- whether of the court or the hovel, from bankers to ragpickers, high and low. On the surface, this is a modern day version of Lear: An old man gives everything to his ambitious daughters and dies. The focus of the story, however, is no more on Papa Goriot and his daughters than on all the other characters in the story: the ambitious Rastignac, the plotting Vautrin, the good Dr. Bianchon, the clueless Victorine, the struggling Delphine de Nucingen -- all are caught in a web. (As was Balzac.) This book changed the way I see the world. It can do no less for you. It is as if, suddenly, the mist that hides the motives of men parts, and we see the world of men as it really is, with all the marionette strings tangled up as each puppet strives to claw its way toward the top.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Honore De Balzac
by Honore De Balzac
by Honore De Balzac
by Stendhal
by Honoré de Balzac
See all 54 books this book cites
