Word: balzac
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Whenever he finds himself at a loss in the depiction of his characters, Auchincloss resorts to literary reference: Fred Stiles, a colleague of Jamey's, "thought of himself as the hero of a Balzac novel"; Amy complains to her husband, "You're treating me like Nora in A Doll's House"; in a more charitable mood, she broods, "The Brontë governess had found her Rochester...
...Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision, one comprehensive principle The foxes (Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, for example) are pluralists pursuing many unrelated, even contradictory ends, moving simultaneously on many different levels...
...core of Sontag's argument is that photography is not an art: it is a language, a neutral medium. Its analogue is not painting but paint. "Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures and Atget's Paris...
...frugs and polkas of his rivals and enemies are all perfectly timed and performed in Le Carré's works; the choreographer does indeed know his nation and its people. Nevertheless, the thoroughly English writer relies a bit too heavily on foreign literary sources. Turgenev is a longtime enthusiasm, and Balzac is a novelist toward whom he is idolatrous. The Frenchman, insists Le Carré, is unparalleled for "sheer narrative thrust: everything has a material connection. There's no style, just fact, fact, fact." He has a special affection for an imagined cast: "I can see myself, like Balzac, inquiring after them...
...literary Establishment has never considered Anthony Trollope a great novelist, like such near contemporaries as Tolstoy, Flaubert or Balzac. Noted at least partly for his prodigious output -47 novels, five travel books, and innumerable articles-he has never been ranked higher than third or fourth among his peers in Victorian England, after Dickens, George Eliot and probably Thackeray. Readers, however, have been kinder, and Trollope has always enjoyed an enthusiastic following. During World War II, for example, he ranked first in the esteem of English readers, and Londoners took him down to the Tubes to help them forget the German...