Word: balzac
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Behind every great fortune," Balzac wrote, "there is a crime." That's the contention of the stunning lawsuit filed last week by Digital Equipment Corp. against microchip giant Intel. The great fortune in this case comes courtesy of the Pentium microprocessing chip, which runs 85% of the earth's personal computers and helped feed Intel $6.45 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 1997 alone. The alleged crime is Intel's "willful infringement" on 10 Dig-ital patents in building the Pentium series. And the suggested punishment: damages that could run into the billions and an injunction against continued...
...novel can, and probably no other setting--sprawling, crisscrossed with relationships, randomly cruel and beautiful--better suits the novel's strengths. Certainly, masterpieces have been written about smaller communities, but the correspondence between city and novelist is unique, and so it is that we refer to Dickens' London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin...
...open up onto whole worlds. And with characteristic deliberation, he has steadily moved from a first collection of stories (Swimming Lessons) to a prizewinning mid-length novel (Such a Long Journey) to this new epic, which is worthy of the 19th century masters of tragic realism, from Hardy to Balzac. In response, perhaps, to a world that has "a phobia about anything in slow motion," it restores the old-fashioned virtues of attention and compassion...
...great French storyteller Honore de Balzac could have written this tale of a Faustian bargain gone terribly wrong. In 1965 lawyer Andre-Francois Raffray agreed to "purchase" the house of an elderly client with $500-a-month installments, then a steep price--on condition that he would inherit the property outright the moment she died. Last week, 30 years older and $180,000 poorer, Raffray, 77, expired on Christmas Day. His client, Jeanne Calment, celebrated the holiday with a sumptuous hotel banquet in her hometown of Arles. "We all make bad deals in life," she joked to Raffray when...
...basis--besides, of course, the spectacle of a beloved celebrity on trial for murdering his wife in an unusually gruesome fashion--was the underlying portrait it painted of a particular time and place. Here was precisely the kind of teeming social canvas that the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Eliot and Flaubert used to such great effect. We met earthy Salvadoran maids, beadle-like cops, bumbling civil servants, stalwart limo drivers, beaten-down screenwriters manquas and, of course, comically obsequious houseguests. Occupying the top of the social pecking order in this modern-day Middlemarch was the defendant himself, living...