[.ca] Le père goriot (ISBN 2035881358)

From Amazon.com:
Nobody writes about money like Balzac, and his classic chronicle of a young man from the provinces clawing his way to success in 19th century Paris, even as an older man is victimized by the same milieu, shrewdly captures the financial dimension of so much that goes on between people. The boarding house in which the two protagonists live is a microcosm of their world, and Goriot's treatment by his daughters would make Lear blanch.

"I Am in Hell, and I Have To Stay There.":
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.

The human comedy of Parisian society:
Balzac was a most enthusiastic participant of high society in Paris in his heyday principally because it yielded so many characters for his human comedy. Despite the artifice of glamor, wealth and nobility, a young attorney named Rastignac learns that it is shallow, materialistic and vain beyond all sense. Aspiring to make a name for himself, Rastignac stays in a bording house where he meets old Goriot, a vermicelli merchant with two daughters prominent in Paris society. Like King Lear, Goriot loved his two beautiful daughters but cannot control them and eventually they drain him of all his wealth, refusing to visit him even when he's on his deathbed. Balzac points out that tailors in Paris made more men successful than any other influence. The women who adorned high society were often fighting economic desperation, pawning jewelry and fighting stingey and unfaithful husbands who abandon them. Rastignac is fascinated but repulsed by high society -- probably much like Balzac himself. The writer pours himself emtoionally into his stories, occasionally guilty of being overly sentimental -- the men in difficult or tragic situations easily and frequently shed tears. Balzac painted hundreds, if not thousands, of portraits of the French of his time in his epic human comedy. Not that much has changed really, as far as the human comedy goes. In his garret in Paris writing in the quiet of the late night and early morning, this great and prolific writer has left an astonishing legacy of profound, realistic and wise fiction. From his work it's possible to be transported to Balzac's time and find oneself deeply engaged in his human comedy. Clearly, Balzac is one of France's most important writers and Pere Goriot is certainly one of his finest works. Therefore, to experience Balzac, one couldn't find a more inspired entree in Pere Goriot.

Scathing Expose of the Social Circus:
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 ï¿1/2unfitï¿1/2 company and a threat to the illusion of success, the latter of which being Balzacï¿1/2s 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 ilkï¿1/2-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 sameï¿1/2 This is an amazing book. Highly recommended to the student of life.

MASTERPIECE:
This is a great masterpiece of French classics. Knowledge and understanding of Honore De Balzac is a key to understanding the French literature and Frence itself at that time.

An enthralling tale, told by a master:
There are many ingredients necessary when a writer is cooking up a masterpiece. A fascinating plot, driven by compelling characters -- these are absolutely necessary. We would also like to add an admirable literary style, and hopefully an intriguing milieu for all the incidents of the story. Then toss in, as the major seasoning, a profound dedication to the truth, and the ability to write things which are both interesting and true. This last quality is almost universally overlooked by amateur critics and readers, but was absolutely essential to no less an author than Marcel Proust. Now, has Balzac managed all this, in Pere Goriot? Very much so -- the plot and characters are virtually immortal -- Vautrin and Rastignac will likely live forever, along with Lear and Uriah Heep. Literary style? Balzac's is both awful and wonderful -- his own unique thumb-print, guaranteeing the authenticity of his work. A fascinating milieu?? Nineteenth-century Paris! Fly to visit, on the wings of a book! The truth? Interesting things? Could this Dead White European Male possibly have anything interesting to say? How about this? "If the human heart possesses some innate feeling, surely it is the pride of being the perpetual protector of some weaker creature? And then, if you add to this powerful affection the vivid sense of gratitude, felt by all candid souls for the primary cause of their pleasures, you will have understood a host of psychological oddities." (p. 100, trans. Burton Raffel) Remove the phrase "psychological oddities" and replace it with "the grand flow of human life," and you have something very interesting to think about: parents and their children, many cases of love, people with their pets -- we do indeed seem to have an "innate feeling" for reaching out to nurture others. How remarkable of Balzac to have pointed this out! This novel is one for the ages. Highest recommendation!!