Customer Reviews

The Wild Ass's Skin

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

O.K. A minority opinion. Nowhere are the master storyteller's considerable talents more admirably on display than in this quintessential commentary on the futility of desire. What is the locus of Balzac's genius? One of the all-time masters of character development, Balzac allows us a deeper appreciation of interiority.

What perhaps disturbs certain modern and post-modern readers about La Peau de Chagrin, derives from their delimiting reliance on the modern scientific world view. The very idea of a talisman - which certain magical powers - a love potion - is `hokey' or `wacky'. Of course, U.F.O.'s are somewhat plausible and `ring viruses' even moreso.

If the vehicle might seem uncomfortably quaint to some, the dignity of the project is, I feel, hardly compromised. Of course, we have that memorable, if not prototypical, B-film, "Into the Night", which seems to indicate that in fiction, weird things can still be acquired at antique stores and junk shops.

The question raised is however whether Balzac does bring his A-game to La Peau de Chagrin, and I claim most emphatically: A +. What is offered here is not dime store murder mystery fare (the genre of Earl Stanley Gardner, E. Howard Hunt, Dan Brown, et al) . . . but mortality mystery in dime store guise. Underlying the superfluity of our celebrated romantic angst is the dark inevitability of our certain doom. What Balzac wishes us the see in the tragic absurdity of his characters' collective fate, is that the doom and the desire are commensurate. If as we live, we die, if our inexorable desires are fatally predatory upon our better sense, what is the point of living, where is the meaning? This query, Balzac poses most seriously in his elsewhere acknowledged masterpiece, and for better or worse, we are still trying to answer that sphinxian riddle.

This is bo no means the man's best book. I have read 4 of his other works and this is the worst yet it is still an excellent book.

The plot focuses around Raphael, a depressed man who acquires a talisman that will grant your wishes. The catch is everytime you make a wish, the talisman diminishes, as does your health. The book is divided up almost into three seperate parts. The first deals with Raphael going to an elegant diner with colleagues followed by an orgy. The second part is cloddish and long as it discusse Raphael's romance towards Foedora. She is a sly temptress who really comes across as an uncompelling ice queen. Why Raphael would go after her is beyond me.

The third part features the books most touching moments and also its most wonderful imagery. This is where Raphael flees to the country and ponders his existence.

Overall a good book, worth reading and all of that. If you are considering Blazac read Eugenie Grandet and Ursule Mirouet first. Then read La Pere Goriot and Cesar Birrotteau. They are all far more compelling books.

While the philosophical implications of a talisman that incrementally depletes the life-force with each wish granted are conceptually fascinating, the novel suffers from both the absence of character development and a weak plotline.

Moreover, Balzac's mind-numbingly long descriptive passages are self-indulgent, do little to advance the story, and ultimately undermine its dramatic potential -- probably the most frustrating aspect overall.

The psychological and moral themes underpinning the book are brilliantly articulated in Balzac's later works, such as Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions, and A Harlot High and Low. Start with these, as only an ardent Balzac fan would appreciate this earlier book.

Hunt delivers an excellent translation that captures Balzac's shrewd observations of human behavior and irony. However, the razor-sharp social criticism that is so pervasive in Balzac's other novels is in short supply.

This strange, Faustian novel is a mixed bag. Reading certain parts is like wading through a bog. (For example, I recommend skipping pages 31-42, in which a would-be suicide reflects upon the nature of existence and instead of seeing his own life pass before his eyes is treated to a grandiose historical retrospective encompassing "whole countries, reigns and eras"...trust me, it's painful to read.) On the other hand, there is a great deal that is worthwhile and 75% of the novel is very well done.

The plot of "The Wild Ass's Skin" centers upon Raphael de Valentin, a young man of good family who has fallen upon hard times and has decided to end his life. Raphael is a man of talent, a writer who for several years has toiled, not unhappily, on a huge treatise. He leads a monk-like existence in a garret apartment, but he does have some interaction with people and finds a peculiar joy in the contemplative life. His world is disrupted when two events occur simultaneously: 1) he finishes his treatise, but the work is not well received because he has no patron to promote it; 2) he becomes enamored of a wealthy society lady. Initially drawn to this woman for mercenary reasons (Raphael hopes that if he becomes a regular member of her salon, the lady and her coterie will use their influence to publicize his book), he soon falls hopelessly and pathetically in love. Realizing that a man doesn't score with the ladies -- at least not the society ladies -- unless he invests a great deal of money in his personal appearance as well as in gifts, flowers, taxis, theatre tickets, etc, Raphael abandons his studious life and fritters away what little money he has in an effort to win her.

Eventually, he finds himself broke and demoralized, contemplating suicide. He develops a plan to toss himself into the Seine once darkness falls. Awaiting nightfall, he wanders into an old curiosity shop that has floors of elaborate show-rooms filled with relics of ancient civilizations and great works of art. Here, he encounters a mysterious talisman, THE WILD ASS'S SKIN. A Yoda/Siddhartha-like old man, the shop's proprietor, explains that the skin represents "power and will united." It has the power to grant a man's every desire. Raphael, growing excited, vows that he wants to live a life of Bacchanalian excess: wine, women, wealth, orgies, general dissipation. Yoda tries to discourage him from making a pact with the wild ass's skin, warning that the skin exacts a toll - "Your desires will be scrupulously satisfied, but at the expense of your life" (every time a desire is granted, the skin grows a little smaller, the shrinkage representing the dwindling number of its owner's days) - but Raphael recklessly grabs the skin, arguing that since he was already considering suicide, he has nothing to lose.

This novel shows Balzac at his best and worst. At his best, he is detailing his character's downward slide with descriptive passages that manage to convey Raphael's terrible desperation - there's a great opening scene in which the jaded denizens of a gambling den watch with some pity as Raphael loses the last of his money - or, conversely, describing Raphael's romances and the joys of being in love in such ecstatic prose that the reader begins to think, "Gee, I've never felt this good about a relationship. Maybe my life has just been a hollow shell of half-emotion." At his worst, Balzac's writing devolves into bathos. There's also a weird philosophical/pseudo-mystical strain running through the novel which is awkwardly implemented. He tries, unsuccessfully, to surround the wild ass's skin with a sense of magic by generating long lists of mysterious-sounding adjectives and allusions when introducing the skin to the reader. There also are attempts at symbolism which don't quite work. As mentioned, the skin represents Will or desire (Raphael's unpublished treatise is entitled "Theory of the Will"). Balzac vaguely postulates that human will, when concentrated upon a single object, can overcome all obstacles, even overturning the absolute laws of nature. In the last third of the novel, a series of experts, representing the latest advances in scientific and medical thought, attempt to destroy the wild ass's skin, so Balzac seems to be pitting Progress or Empiricism against his theory of the Will. Because the theory is never clearly developed, the symbolism is confusing.

Despite its weaknesses, most of the novel is quite exciting, and Balzac has some interesting things to say about love and art. Balzac on Love: He identifies a certain type of man who is drawn only to women who are the center of male attention, surrounded by a host of admirers. This type of man longs to win the love of the woman who is the cynosure of all eyes because it will validate his worth in the eyes of other men. Love, then, is egoism. Women are equally self-serving in love, noticing "only the flaws in a man of talent and only the good qualities in the character of a fool. They feel great sympathy for the qualities a fool possesses, since these exist as a perpetual flattery for their own defects..." Balzac on Art: Balzac contrasts different types of artists/scholars. There is the artist who craves recognition and is driven to create because he wants to make a name for himself. Then there is the artist who is so immersed in his work that he loses track of time and doesn't notice that his shirt is unbuttoned and his hair uncombed. Finally, there is the dilettante who invests just enough time in his art to maintain his status as a "literary type" or an "artistic type."

Overall, I recommend this novel, although with this caveat: it is not your typical Balzac novel. It is a strange and uneven work -- but it's good.

The strange story of a suicidal young man who is given a magic ass's skin by an antique dealer who explains it will grant his every wish yet will shrink on each use and his life will be shortened too. The dealer counsels against its use; 'the exercise of WILL consumes us; the exercise of POWER consumes us but the pursuit of KNOWLEDGE leaves our infirm constitution in a state of perpetual calm.' Nonetheless our hero's first wish is for a bacchanalian feast...

I only started to get into the book in chapter 2 where the hero, Raphael, tells his life story; a severe childhood, eventual loss of all family wealth but a determination to live in penury while he devoted himself to writing a great book. Unfortunately he is introduced to the beautiful yet shallow and heartless Feodora, the pursuit of whom eats up his small savings. All the time he remains oblivious to the lovely Pauline who adores him.

By chapter 3 we see Raphael living in great wealth but seeking to avoid having any more desires to cause the skin to shrink. He accidentally meets up with Pauline and realises he loves her. They begin an affair but the desire for her is shortening his life...

The story put me much in mind of Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Grey' and gave me the same 'unhealthy' feeling throughout. But it absolutely keeps you reading and is brilliantly written apart from the somewhat unconvincing love scenes between Raphael and Pauline (I also found some of the conversation at the banquet a bit obscure). Very different from Balzac's better known works like Goriot and Cousin Bette but worth reading

I liked this book. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray some years ago, so as I was reading this I felt like the concept is very similar. Still, it's a good thought provoking read.

Certainly not Balzac's finest, but still compelling in its own way. The thing ya gotta understand firstly is that this is one of the man's self-consciously 'philosophical' novels, meaning that drawing realistic and complex character portraits is not a primary concern. It's certainly possible to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Raphael, but he's not really much of a 'character,' and if this was one's first encounter with Balzac, one might get the false impression that he just wasn't able to draw deep characters. Anyway: this is, if I recall, only the second novel of the Human Comedy, and in many ways the ideas presented form the basis for his later works. The idea of success without any real work--success which turns out to be fleeting and ephermeral--is a common Balzacian theme, but here it's taken in a literal sense: Raphael acheives success not through his own merits but rather through the magical powers of the skin in question, even as this continued 'success' gradually diminishes his life-force. Compare this with Lucien in Lost Illusions, who rises and falls in much the same manner, only without any sort of physical representation of this rise and fall.

Bleh. The real question is, is the book a good read? Yeah, more or less. It definitely gets better as it goes along; one's patience is definitely tried by the antique shop sequence near the beginning, and I found the banquet/orgy scene to be more than a little tedious. However! Things do pick up: Raphael's courtship of Faedora is well done, and the novel's climax is wonderfully bizarre and nightmarish (I swear, it made me think of Lovecraft). The reader's patience is rewarded; it just takes a little while. As previously noted, not a good first Balzac (try Old Goriot), but once you're hooked, a worthwhile piece of work that provides priceless insights into the author's mode of thinking.

Another great novel by the HdB. However, if you aren't a classic lit person, or aren't a French lit person, or if you're a person who regularly buys books on a swiveling display this probably isn't the pulp you need. With that being said, the book's theme is solid. I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't stolen it already. The work is a sort of Yang to Lost Illusion's Yin. It has great HdB commentary and insight and of equal quality if not greater to the rest of the body of works.

This is a quite interesting and charming novel even for someone who is not exactly a passionate reader of the 'classics'. The central idea, an ancient talisman with the power to make wishes come true, but shrinks with every desire that becomes true is fascinating and deeply philosophical and "human". I think Balzac should have elaborated more on this idea, exploring the dimensions of human desire and discovering more complex and deep characters for his novel. Instead, making the talisman work also for very trivial and passing desires, makes the while situation almost comical and superficial. It looks like Balzac didn't take himself too seriously with this novel and saved his efforts. Pity, but this is still a fascinating read.