What do You think about Père Goriot (1997)?
If you are interested in Balzac, you might be interested in checking out a blog I have just set up for the Yahoo Balzac group. It's at http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/ and we are gradually posting summaries of the stories that the group has read over the years, and various other useful bits and pieces as well. I think it is going to become a very useful resource for lovers of Balzac.
—Teresa
Balzac is perfect in this book where the good sensibility is mere moral pretend. At first view, Father Goriot is just a good old man that wants the happiness to his daughters. But they don’t love him as he would must be loved. His daughters have shame of him and blame him of his poverty. The good old man suffers cause of this relationship through all novel and end his life in a horrible and pathetic condition. This is a sad history to you? However, Balzac get become it much more cruel yet. Goriot isn’t the good person that we imagine that he is. Goriot is a man that would make all and any things to enter in the high society. How he can’t. He educates his daughters for this. In another words, he sell them to distinct sons of good families and have pleasure with the life that they have. He is, in truth, a mix of voyeur and gigolo of his daughters.This is Balzac in his best form.
—Cleyton Boson
It's good to study up on the history of the novel -- this one's apparently a founding father. Maybe if I'd read it with nothing to do for a week my experience would've been different, but I was too often distracted to commit to the concerns of early-19th century Paris. As such, my feelings about this one are mixed, like with Stendhal's The Red and the Black last year. I love the expository jags, the proclamations about the behavior of all young men, all women in Paris. The essayistic asides seem perfectly phrased, always calling for enthusiastic dog-earing, as though I'll one day find on the page the bit of wisdom that struck me the first time through. I'd love to read essays by Balzac, or even a collection of insights into human nature culled from his hundred million novels. Sometimes I was reminded of that bit in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto where David Shields comes clean and says he thinks novels are life-support systems for eloquent articulation of wisdom/theme. I often sort of muddled through the dramatization, not always sure who was who and what was happening where. (The names/surnames of too many characters start with "V" for me?) Reading this, it became real clear how much we modern readers (ie, "I") rely on chapter breaks and white space between sections or at least clear transitions between scenes. In this, once a scene ends, in the next paragraph a character is propelled across Paris by no more than a hard return. This sort of thing requires an attention I might not always have paid, in part because I wasn't so engaged in the young social climber's upwardly mobile quest? The title character's unconditional love for his daughters is undeniably moving, and maybe also more cloying than Balzac's statements that it's Christ-like. But his daughters I didn't see nearly as well -- and if you don't see someone so well that character is pretty much screwed since being seen by readers gives characters a heartbeat and breath. So: Loved the wisdom zingers throughout, liked the two major male characters, thought less of minor characters (even Cheat-Death), wasn't so engaged by the plot, and wasn't always sure what was going down in the dramatized bits. Seven stars for the expository jags, but maybe 3.25 stars overall, with respect for the writer's perception and humility for my abilities as a distractable 21st century reader.
—Lee
