Word: balzacs
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...publicized and televised violence of everyday existence, hijacking and all sorts of minor events that used to be a mystery for the novelists in the past have helped to kill the narrative novel. I mean a certain kind of novel with which we are all familiar-going from Balzac to Tolstoy. This sort of narrative novel had already received a blow with the publication of Madame Bovary. Do you know what Alexandre Dumas' reaction was when he read Bovaryl He told his son, 'If that is what literature has become, we've had it!' And right...
Angelic films at Quincy House. Was it these cyclists Balzac foretold: "Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cashboxes for hearts...
...idol was Napoleon. He kept a little statue of the Emperor on his writing desk for inspiration. Balzac's opinion of his own worth was certainly Napoleonic: "I have the most extraordinary character. I am astonished by nothing more than myself." His goal was to do with his pen what Bonaparte had done with the sword. He succeeded. As V.S. Pritchett says, "His fecundity throbs, his power of documentation, his ubiquity as a novelist are extraordinary. There is the spry, pungent and pervasive sense that, in any scene, he was there and in the flesh...
Getting this gargantuan figure there on the page is Pritchett's task as a biographer, and in many ways he succeeds. He has a shrewd sense of the whole Balzac family, particularly the author's adoring mother and sister who alternately lent him money foolishly, connived with him against creditors and betrayed him to competing women...
Pritchett's knowledge of Balzac's body of writing is so well assimilated that he can call on it at will. There are no noisome transitions between "life" and "work." Fictional characters and stories are woven into the book as they reflect on Balzac's life or illustrate the boiling contradictions of his nature...