Honoré de Balzac Available to Purchase

Peter Brooks’s monograph captures some of the most attractive aspects of Honoré de Balzac’s gigantic Human Comedy, the series of novels and novellas that according to Oscar Wilde’s bold statement “invented” the nineteenth century. Brooks confesses that initially Stendhal’s novels interested him most, given their links with the transparent psychology of earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French moralists (La Rochefoucauld) and immoralists (Choderlos de Laclos). Later, discovering Père Goriot, Brooks admired Balzac’s depiction of the “naked and unabashed” ambition of his young characters and their need for satisfying “unlimited” desires (7). Sex and wealth obsess them, love being quite often convertible into money. Each character, moreover, has a long, complicated past and future, whose details can be found in other novels or novellas that belong to Balzac’s vast oeuvre. This “crowd of characters” (11) invites readers to follow their innumerable life paths and discover a society where the violence...