Bah, Balzac

I decided to forgo Balzac for now and jump into The House of Mirth as my next novel - it's been immediately gratifying from page one. In Lily Bart, I've finally found a character I am interested in and sympathize with from page one (not page 200!) - I actually had to force myself to turn out the light last night (usually I'm forcing myself to keep it on). What a treat. In the meantime, I'm going to try to crank through the Emerson essays and The Scarlet Letter, as I've already read them in my younger days.

A dollop of Trollope

Actually, it's been much more than a dollop. When I first opened The Prime Minister, I looked at the last few pages and saw it was less than 400 pages long. Perfect, I thought! I'll breeze through this! Well, I got to page 300, looked at where I was, and realized something was amiss, because it didn't even look like I was halfway through the book! The book is in two volumes - BLAST!

I realize I sound like a big whiner complaining about the length of these books, but it really is just that much more daunting as I think to how much I have to still read before classes start, and suddenly 400 more pages are thrown at me. Eeek!

I am enjoying the book, though - he's living up to his own dictum of making fiction readable. Some of the political portions get dull, but the villain, Ferdinand Lopez, is a lot of fun, and I do really want to find out what will happen to his unfortunate wife, Emily. The interplay between The Duke and Duchess of Omnium is also very interesting, and seems a very honest portrayal of marriage.

Next up, Balzac, and again, The Writer's Almanac has gotten me in the mood just in time:

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century — La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.

He wrote about everyone and everything, about banks, offices, factories, the stock market, the media, and the first commercial advertisements.

Balzac had a huge influence on later 19th-century French novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Henry James thought he was the best novelist of all time, and Willa Cather once said, "If one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live." Today, Balzac is rarely studied in American schools. Even in France, Balzac's novels are outsold by writers like Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Collette.

Balzac said, "All happiness depends on courage and work."