I've just finished Stefan Zweig's biography of Balzac, which is wonderful. One thing he points out (repeatedly) is that when it came to depicting commerce and finance in his books, Balzac was extremely astute and could paint a vivid picture of shrewd and ruthless characters like Grandet, but in his own life he was totally naive about all business matters and got fleeced on everything from real estate to silver mines to tchotchkes from antique shops.
Hahaha that somehow seems completely fitting--he does into kind of a crazy amount of financial detail in Grandet. The biography sounds like a great book--it must now go on the to-read list!
Isn't DeForest the one who coined the term "Great American Novel"? I ran across an essay of his recently where he said UTC was the closest we'd yet come to him. Is his own work any good?
To put my pedant hat on: He didn't coin the term exactly, but he popularized it in that essay--your memory serves right. I haven't yet read everything he's published, but I will say that, out of what I read, Miss Ravenel's Conversion is quite good and everything else is very, very bad. The Bloody Chasm in particular is... just wretched, and Witching Times I found overlong and dull in the last hundred pages. I haven't yet read his other most well-regarded novel, Kate Beaumont, which was pretty strongly praised by some major critics.
Miss Ravenel's Conversion, though--well worth reading, and filled with probably the most realistic depictions of Civil War battle in American fiction. It also, interestingly, explicitly and implicitly criticizes UTC. (His basic critique is that Tom is too idealized and that Stowe is too afraid to show the world as it actually is, which is along the same lines, I believe, that Dickens criticized it.)
I have yet to read any Balzac, but I enjoyed the post! Your writing is very fun to read—insightful and witty. I think this has to be my favorite part: “He’s so mythically thorough in his greed—it’s so unalloyed and pure—that he seems starkly unrepresentative of real life, in which even miserly people have some interests or impulses other than money.”
I cannot speak for your translation, and Balzac wrote so much that surely some of it is bad. But I can say that as someone with some French but not enough to read in the original, MUCH English translation of French literature (most of which is by British writers) until roughtly the 1930s (and mostly well after that) is quite bad. It tends to ignore the French style, and Britishize it, and Victorian translators often bowdlerized the sexy bits. Gutenberg often has these terrible Victorian editions and they do no one any service except that not every book has been translated to English. If you insist on reading ebooks, and you shouldnt, no one should, you really ought to look into for instance the Brookyln Public Library and other libraries that allow electronic lending from people nowhere near their geographic region, and are more likely than not going to have Oxford or Penguin ebook editions of translations that are technically in print but not in any store you'll ever see.
Also, Graham Robb's biography of Balzac is a great place for an English-language reader to start. And you really should read Lost Illusions, it is one of the best. Still relevant.
To your point about "realist fiction" I think distinguishing between psychological realism and mere mimetic realism is useful, because for instance Henry James is really about interiority and the subjective psychological constraints of his characters, and Dickens, though concerned with those and internal consistency, depend as much on plot and tropes to tug sentimental threads. neither is wrong! But often missed is how different were French v. English v. Russian v. X psychologicial/realist novels from the 19th C heyday of the form, and how that affected the later iterations. First British, then American writers have always seemed the most concerned with the full panoply of realistic psychology and characters of all of them, whereas Dostoevsky for instance is all but indifferent to consistency and psychological clarity despite which his characters sing with what looks like madness.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of The Chouans being the very first novel that Balzac was willing to put his name on AND that it's a bad translation by Wormeley. There does appear to be a translation from 1972 by Maria Ayton Crawford, who translated the version of Eugénie Grandet that I so enjoyed, so I've ordered that from my university library. We'll see how it fares when it gets here!
"They’re all unforgettable characters because they are so emphatically possessed by their primary traits—in other words, because they are basically “flat,” non-“dynamic” characters"
You are soo right! I never realized this that clearly, we are so used to associate great writers with psychological nuances of their characters, but often this is just a projection.
For me Balzac is the best of all antidotes against cultural pessimism. When somebody tells: "Nowadays people are so selfish and ignorant" I recommend to read Père Goriot.
P.S. You accent on Eugénie switches back and forth between acute and grave...
...but, yes, it's always nice to have a reminder that avaricious grasping didn't originate with us. We might be coming up with new, more efficient ways of doing it. I wonder what the Balzac of today might write about. LinkedIn? Sports gambling apps? A vicious local car dealership owner? An ambitious, striving young influencer trying to sleep their way to the top?
I've just finished Stefan Zweig's biography of Balzac, which is wonderful. One thing he points out (repeatedly) is that when it came to depicting commerce and finance in his books, Balzac was extremely astute and could paint a vivid picture of shrewd and ruthless characters like Grandet, but in his own life he was totally naive about all business matters and got fleeced on everything from real estate to silver mines to tchotchkes from antique shops.
Hahaha that somehow seems completely fitting--he does into kind of a crazy amount of financial detail in Grandet. The biography sounds like a great book--it must now go on the to-read list!
One of many great things about Balzac is that he unfailingly gives the prices of everything.
Isn't DeForest the one who coined the term "Great American Novel"? I ran across an essay of his recently where he said UTC was the closest we'd yet come to him. Is his own work any good?
To put my pedant hat on: He didn't coin the term exactly, but he popularized it in that essay--your memory serves right. I haven't yet read everything he's published, but I will say that, out of what I read, Miss Ravenel's Conversion is quite good and everything else is very, very bad. The Bloody Chasm in particular is... just wretched, and Witching Times I found overlong and dull in the last hundred pages. I haven't yet read his other most well-regarded novel, Kate Beaumont, which was pretty strongly praised by some major critics.
Miss Ravenel's Conversion, though--well worth reading, and filled with probably the most realistic depictions of Civil War battle in American fiction. It also, interestingly, explicitly and implicitly criticizes UTC. (His basic critique is that Tom is too idealized and that Stowe is too afraid to show the world as it actually is, which is along the same lines, I believe, that Dickens criticized it.)
This is great
I have yet to read any Balzac, but I enjoyed the post! Your writing is very fun to read—insightful and witty. I think this has to be my favorite part: “He’s so mythically thorough in his greed—it’s so unalloyed and pure—that he seems starkly unrepresentative of real life, in which even miserly people have some interests or impulses other than money.”
I cannot speak for your translation, and Balzac wrote so much that surely some of it is bad. But I can say that as someone with some French but not enough to read in the original, MUCH English translation of French literature (most of which is by British writers) until roughtly the 1930s (and mostly well after that) is quite bad. It tends to ignore the French style, and Britishize it, and Victorian translators often bowdlerized the sexy bits. Gutenberg often has these terrible Victorian editions and they do no one any service except that not every book has been translated to English. If you insist on reading ebooks, and you shouldnt, no one should, you really ought to look into for instance the Brookyln Public Library and other libraries that allow electronic lending from people nowhere near their geographic region, and are more likely than not going to have Oxford or Penguin ebook editions of translations that are technically in print but not in any store you'll ever see.
Also, Graham Robb's biography of Balzac is a great place for an English-language reader to start. And you really should read Lost Illusions, it is one of the best. Still relevant.
To your point about "realist fiction" I think distinguishing between psychological realism and mere mimetic realism is useful, because for instance Henry James is really about interiority and the subjective psychological constraints of his characters, and Dickens, though concerned with those and internal consistency, depend as much on plot and tropes to tug sentimental threads. neither is wrong! But often missed is how different were French v. English v. Russian v. X psychologicial/realist novels from the 19th C heyday of the form, and how that affected the later iterations. First British, then American writers have always seemed the most concerned with the full panoply of realistic psychology and characters of all of them, whereas Dostoevsky for instance is all but indifferent to consistency and psychological clarity despite which his characters sing with what looks like madness.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of The Chouans being the very first novel that Balzac was willing to put his name on AND that it's a bad translation by Wormeley. There does appear to be a translation from 1972 by Maria Ayton Crawford, who translated the version of Eugénie Grandet that I so enjoyed, so I've ordered that from my university library. We'll see how it fares when it gets here!
"They’re all unforgettable characters because they are so emphatically possessed by their primary traits—in other words, because they are basically “flat,” non-“dynamic” characters"
You are soo right! I never realized this that clearly, we are so used to associate great writers with psychological nuances of their characters, but often this is just a projection.
For me Balzac is the best of all antidotes against cultural pessimism. When somebody tells: "Nowadays people are so selfish and ignorant" I recommend to read Père Goriot.
P.S. You accent on Eugénie switches back and forth between acute and grave...
Ack! I fixed the accent...
...but, yes, it's always nice to have a reminder that avaricious grasping didn't originate with us. We might be coming up with new, more efficient ways of doing it. I wonder what the Balzac of today might write about. LinkedIn? Sports gambling apps? A vicious local car dealership owner? An ambitious, striving young influencer trying to sleep their way to the top?