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Maybe someday
33
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
55/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
Peter Brooks
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
October 6, 2020
A Yale literature professor dives into the mind of one of the 19th century's premier novelists, via an analysis of the lives of some of his most memorable characters.
What The Reviewers Say
Taken as a whole, Balzac’s works mirror his time, and what Brooks shows us here is the making of that mirror. Following a brief introduction, he devotes each chapter to a principal character in nine of what he considers Balzac’s most illustrative works...in effect looking over the novelist’s shoulder as he creates his fictional beings. The result is a more nuanced and intimate portrait than can be found in a conventional biography.
Unwieldy for beginners, a bit superfluous for scholars, Balzac’s Lives will best serve the intermediate Balzacian: someone who has read Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, and Lost Illusions and wants to know what holds them all together.
Loosely connected biographical sketches of Balzac’s central characters sandwiched between two chapters of insightful literary analysis.
... [an] enjoyable but puzzling work of literary criticism.
