Word: balzacs
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...novel, TIME, Aug. 2] does not please me. It took nine years to write that book and I once tore up its first version. "Generally I don't read my countrymen's books. In fact, I read little. At my age [56], I prefer to read Flaubert, Balzac, Cervantes' Don Quixote and the Bible . . . The few times I tried to read Truman Capote, I had to give up . . . His literature makes me nervous...
...Stanley Geist, a young American critic and writer living in Paris, offers the richer literary experience. The selections range from a Stendhal love story, as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony, to a fragment of Swiftian satire by Baudelaire on the suicide of a Parisian street urchin. In between, Balzac, Zola and Guy de Maupas sant lash at the favorite whipping boy of French letters, the French middle class. Best yarns in the book are stories of simple nobodies by Gustave Flaubert and Joris-Karl Huysmans...
Having introduced his characters, Jarrell finds nothing much for them to do. The talk ranges from Holbein to Mondrian, from Balzac to Thomas Mann, and from Beethoven to Alban Berg. But about all that happens in the whole course of the novel is that an English teacher dies and the music teacher hires a secretary. Wound up like talking clocks on Page One. each of the characters finally runs down by Page...
...Nohant in the French province of Berry would be a Niagara of sound. Chopin and Liszt set their music echoing through it; Flaubert and the younger Dumas produced puppet plays (music by Chopin) on its floor. Delacroix painted in Nohant's garden studio, and such famous guests as Balzac, Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny argued and tittle-tattled in its drawing room. In the middle years of the 19th century, Nohant's halls, echoed to the thump of packed bags as estranged lovers and mistresses stormed down them-and if Nohant's old walls could speak...
...Walking Graveyard. "What it all comes to," said Balzac in his brusque way, "is that she is a man: all the more so since she wants to be one." Pianist Chopin agreed. "How antipathetic this Sand woman is!" he complained after meeting her. "Is she really a woman at all?" Soon after, he wrote in his diary: "She gazed deep into my eyes while I played . . . My heart was captured! . . . She loves...