the statistics on this site show me that this is in fact one of the 25 most visited pages on notsoswift.com. so, someone somewhere is reading this.
i've turned on comments for this post. feel free to share. is there a specific novel, or group of novels, or translations, of individual works from the CH that would get me started? i'm a little surprised; i devoured proust, got lost in the unabridged les miserables, and am getting my feet wet with flaubert. why don't i get into the balzac the same way?
thoughtful comments and personal experiences will be most appreciated.
Posted by Amber at April 23, 2003 08:11 AMPersonally, I think the way to go about reading Balzac is non-linearly... that is, start off with the best books, rather than the ones that come first chronologically. From what I've read, the opus is very uneven, in that some of it is dated or boring, whilst other stuff is incredibly exciting to read. The first I read was la pere goriot, which was what made me realise what a fantastic project this was. Other stuff was less good, but Eugenie grandet and The unknown masterpiece were both good.
I've just finished Lost illusions and my assessment would be, it's overlong, and you can go ahead and skip the long exegeses on paper manufacturing, but if you persevere to the end it's pretty great as well. La cousin bette is also supposed to rock.
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Posted by: matt b on June 28, 2003 05:25 PMI agree that you should start with some of the masterpieces (e.g. goriot) to get yourself hooked before trying to do the whole thing sequentially. Or at least that worked for me.
One thing about the CH is that you don't really start to feel the impact of the recurring characters until you've read a fair number of the books. That's another reason it's good to start with a central work like goriot -- you get to meet some of the central characters right away.
Also, one of balzac's biggest strengths is in building a story to a climax. This makes the longer works potentially more satisfying (as long as you get to the end of them) -- there are more threads wound together and thus more de-knotting to be done. So starting with a bunch of shorter works might not give you a feel for the power of the CH.
I think the order of titles you posted is just one of several sequences balzac himself suggested (he seems to have periodically revised everything and changed his mind about the order, too), so there's no reason you need to consider it authoritative.
If you ever reconsider trying to read the whole CH, you might not want to dismiss the idea of reading the books electronically. It makes it extremely easy to find them and read them in whatever order you want. Also (and pardon me for completely geeking out here), it lets you do fun stuff like this:
~/books/balzac> cat to_be_read/*.txt | wc -w
1987119
~/books/balzac> cat already_read/*.txt | wc -w
2251589