Böcker av Honore de Balzac

In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower Normandy a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint, brought on by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other kind. His convale-scence demanded complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and freedom from excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin seemed to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient therefore betook himself, and was received with the cordiality characteristic of relatives who lead very retired lives, and regard a new arrival as a godsend. All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent two or three evenings in his cousin's house, or with the friends who made up Mme. de Sainte-Severe's circle, he very soon had made the acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older day.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower Normandy a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint, brought on by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other kind. His convale-scence demanded complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and freedom from excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin seemed to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient therefore betook himself, and was received with the cordiality characteristic of relatives who lead very retired lives, and regard a new arrival as a godsend. All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent two or three evenings in his cousin's house, or with the friends who made up Mme. de Sainte-Severe's circle, he very soon had made the acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older day.

Balzac's realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for his daughters leads to his personal and financial ruin.

An NYRB Classics OriginalCharacters from every corner of society and all walks of life-lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more-move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac's multivolume magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. The Human Comedy includes the great roomy novels that have exercised such a sway over Balzac's many literary inheritors, from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to Marcel Proust; it also contains an array of short fictions in which Balzac is at his most concentrated and forceful. Nine of these, all newly translated, appear in this volume, and together they provide an unequaled overview of a great writer's obsessions and art. Here are "The Duchesse de Langeais," "A Passion in the Desert," and "Sarrasine"; tales of madness, illicit passion, ill-gotten gains, and crime. What unifies them, Peter Brooks points out in his introduction, is an incomparable storyteller's fascination with the power of storytelling, while throughout we also detect what Proust so admired: the "mysterious circulation of blood and desire."

The three short fictions in this unique collection, Sarrasine, The Unknown Masterpiece, and The Girl with the Golden Eyes, deal with the relationship between artistic ideals and sexual desires. They show Balzac's mastery of the seductions of storytelling, and are among the 19th century's richest explorations of life and art.

A young man, in despair over gambling debts, buys a magical animal skin that grants his every wish but hastens its owner's death in the process. Balzac's compelling tale is here presented in an exuberant new translation, with an illuminating introduction and notes.

Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his daughter Eugenie's twenty third birthday his foppish nephew Charles suddenly arrives from Paris. Eugenie has never known passion.

This fine example of the French realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for his daughters leads to his personal and financial ruin.

Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courtesans to successful businessmen and official dignitaries.The tragic outcome of the novel is relieved by occasional flashes of ironic comedy and the emergence of a younger generation which has come to terms with the new political and econimic climate.This new translation by Sylvia Raphael has an Introduction by David Bellos which sets the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.

This unabridged edition of these famous tales, marvelous for their graceful impudence and sly artistry, has been re-edited and revised by Ernest Boyd so as to bring it as close as possible to the original. "In his preface," wrote Professor George Saintsbury, "Balzac acknowledged his indebtedness to his master Rabelais; and, to be sure, the points of likeness between those two great Frenchmen are striking. They both put on a mask of comedy and rakishness in order to write with more freedom about manners, customs, politics and religion."

One of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie Humaine, Eugenie Grandet (1833) is a story of family conflict, unrequited love and self-sacrifice set against the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The text is that of Burton Raffell's acclaimed 1994 translation.

In this novel of obsessive passion the author tells stories of Old Goriot and the ungrateful daughters he adores; young Rastignac, a country lad determined to make his way in Paris; and Vautrin, his satanic tempter. Their lives all cross in the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris.

A hypnotic story of hatred, revenge and catastrophe in which Cousin Bette exacts a terrible price from the rich relations who use and humiliate her. This book portrays the world of post-Napoleonic France, where commercial greed and sexual debauchery are rampant among a demoralized ruling class.