Word: balzacs
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PROMETHEUS: THE LIFE OF BALZAC by AndréMaurois. 573 pages. Harper...
Critics have repeatedly noted that Balzac's life would have made an excellent Balzac plot. So it would. And so, to a considerable degree, it did. Like many others before him, Maurois reckons up the bill that Balzac's output-97 novels and novellas, scores of stories, articles and plays, 6,000,000 words-owes to the author's experiences. The son of a petit bourgeois whose roots ran deep in France's soil, Balzac never really escaped his origins. Of life he demanded money, love and magic -the themes of all his books-and spent...
Honoré de Balzac did not look or act like a writer, and the literary assessors of his time declined to treat him as one. He was short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comédie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt...
This book, though at times tedious, heaps a hillock of fresh laurels on Balzac's grave. André Maurois, an old hand at literary biographies (Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Proust), disavows that intention. "This is a life of Balzac, not a critical study," he says in a foreword and, having passed his 80th year, announces that it is the last biography he will write. Nevertheless, Prometheus is strewn with the kind of judgments that a disciple makes at the feet of the master: "A super-novelist," "the greatest novelist of the century." Balzac's very faults become...
...absolutely lovable characters he has ever created. "If I were allowed to keep only one of my novels," he remarked not long ago with unaccustomed self-satisfaction, "I would choose this one." It is indeed one of the finest sections in the all-too-human comedy of this barebones Balzac...