Eugenie Grandet (The Human Comedy)

by Honoré de Balzac

Book Overview

'Who is going to marry Eug nie Grandet?' This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eug nie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014044050X
• Release Date: April 1955
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

A miserly tale

A miserly, selfish tale A stingy, avaricious, miserly merchant acquires a fortune utilizing cunning and deceit with complete disregard for principle or scruples - like a Republican running for Congress. His neighbors envious of his wealth and prestige bow and genuflect at his feet, hoping to win his favors while he takes advantage of them at every turn - like conservative voters awaiting the trickle down. Despite his fortune, his wife, daughter and faithful housekeeper suffer greatly as a result of his pious hypocrisy - like the Christian right. His dandy nephew, woes his daughter, assures her of his love, takes what little money she has, takes her pride and then breaks her heart - like a Republican administration. His wife then dies - like a second term. In the end, justice prevails, the father dies, allowing the meek to inherit his wealth. Only, it turns out they never really needed it - like another tax break for the wealthy. Bottom line: A great story by a great writer - all politics aside

Do you know old Goriot from the Maison Vauquer?

I'm going to go ahead and ruin something for you, the potential reader, about Honoré de Balzac. It's nothing to do with plot or character, so you can rest assured that you're safe to get a fresh read from Père Goriot; instead it centers on the author himself. It's something you're going to pick up on as you read through this book. You see, Honoré de Balzac is your best friend. This sounds funny, I realize that, but it's the simple truth. You can feel it in the way that the man writes- He doesn't tell the story to you, so much as he explains it. It's like listening to one of those old men you find in a bar; you're so certain that you're going to laugh at him as he recounts his tale, you're so certain that when he tells you that it's a sad one, that you've heard that statement enough before to know it's a falsity...but then as things progress you begin to realize that you can trust him. You can feel the hand of Balzac on your back, guiding you forward. You begin to trust him...and it's all because he's talking to you as though you were an old friend. Indeed, Père Goriot is a sad tale. Without giving away any more than the back of the book already does, I can say that it encompasses the tale of a man who has sacrificed of himself for his children's sake, as laid out in contrast to the story of a man who asks of his own family that they sacrifice for him. It is the study of both sides of that equation, all tied together through a boardinghouse where every boarder has a story to tell, where every turn and twist is an obstacle for some, an opportunity for others, and an escape for none. All are tied into this Paris that lives and breathes on the page. Balzac was a character writer. He tells you about the person, all the intimate little details that seem so trivial but that build up the image of the person in your mind. You can see Vautrin, the mysterious all-knowing boarder as he watches young Rastignac, the young law student, struggle inside of himself as he wrestles his way into an unforgiving society. In the process of doing so, you watch sometimes in horror, sometimes in fascination, listening to the man deliver speech upon speech, some of which seem to bear an eerie early foreboding to Dostoevsky's `The Grand Inquisitor' for it's sheer, unflinching look at some point of society. Like that writer, Balzac builds the man, then lets him be himself on the page, summoning only those talents that are necessary in a writer to get out of the way and allow the story to tell itself. Is this book worth reading? Absolutely. Who should read it? Anyone who enjoys a tale with action, honor, and ethical, internal struggles. There are criminal men, unscrupulous women, love affairs, dedication, a betrayal...there are all the elements of the modern novel, told in an engaging and playful style that you come to trust and respect and that, in the end, leaves you with a mighty hunger for more... Henry Reed does a great translation as well. His afterword helps to pl

For Love of Gold: The Burden of the Miser, Scathingly Told

Marcel Proust famously said of Balzac: "He hides nothing; he says everything." A more fitting quote has never been attributed to this visionary of the mid-19th century, this paragon and paradox, who at the age of thirty declared that he would devote his life to a chronicle of his contemporary era, classifying the social strata of France through narrative. Balzac went on to write more than ninety novels of his self-styled 'Human Comedy', the deliberate rival and successor to Dante's vast metaphorical triumph, a handful of which are rightly considered to be among the utmost achievement of classical literature. Balzac's ego was as vast as his ambition and his talent, and he considered 'pretended portrayal' - shallow platitudes to disguise interior deficiencies - as vain and unworthy. In his art Balzac sought to consolidate and epitomize whatever themes he worked on at the time, drawing inspiration from his own experiences and multifold resources...if Henry James is correct in his claim that Balzac's great glory stemmed from the fact that he pretended ~hardest~, through the combination of overwork and intuition, then his unique status is assured on that effort alone: but we have his works to draw on, all ninety-three of them, to reassure that Balzac's spirit and intent were pure: in other words, the art of complete representation. Few can match the French genius in this regard. Each of Balzac's novels tackle a different theme of the human condition, and in *Eugenie Grandet*, written in 1833, the subject of avarice is contemplated, and devastatingly revealed, through the author's usual concoction of dry wit, scathing portrayal, minutiae-obsession and omniscient understanding: Balzac's perspective is that of the all-seeing, all-knowing Godhead third eye, simultaneously deconstructing and putting into perspective the actions and consequences of the miser, in all his sordid, gold-grasping compulsion. It's difficult to second-guess or place doubt upon the fiery condemnations explicit in this text: just brace yourself for the ride, and expect the grunts of agreement, the surprised whistles and the startled outbursts of laughter that inevitable result from a tour through this man's prodigious mind. Entering Balzac is to confront oneself with genius, to learn and be humbled...and be entertained, lest I forget, in ways rarely qualified by his contemporaries. It is this humorous quality, implicit in his contemplation of human nature, that endear Balzac so close to my heart; even when you know events are going to turn badly, as they so often do, the rare psychological and sociological insight of the author, so keen, pessimistic yet never despairing, buoy one across the tides of tragedy. I loathe to speak too much of the interior text of any Balzac novel, which in turn always somewhat hinders my attempt at review, for it is my belief that the shape and scope of each particular episode of The Human Comedy should be discovered by the diligent reader with

Good as gold

Monsieur Grandet, the father of the titular heroine of Balzac's short novel "Eugenie Grandet," is not just a miser; he is a caricature of a miser, a modern Midas whose first love is gold, as ornately drawn as Dickens's Scrooge, but somehow more believable. He is an elderly vintner living with his wife and daughter Eugenie, his only child, in a provincial French town called Saumur, and even they don't know exactly how much money he has. He is so stingy he has let his house fall into decrepitude and doles out basic necessities like sugar, candles, and firewood as though there were a shortage. He is so sinfully avaricious that even on his deathbed he can only lust for the priest's silver crucifix. He is devious, too--he has a disarmingly strange business manner in which he feigns stammering and deafness to derail his opponent's train of thought. He is, in short, one of the best characters a reader could hope for. Given the power of Grandet's presence and the extremity of his greed, a reader might expect him to be due for a fall, but Balzac is more interested in demonstrating how Eugenie becomes a noble woman despite, or perhaps because of, her parental influence. The story concerns the fortune of her spoiled but innocent cousin Charles, the son of Grandet's younger brother in Paris, and how she deals with his change in personality after he goes abroad to seek employment after his father's debt-induced suicide and returns having engaged in the cruel enterprise of slave trading. (I was reminded of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is hardened by the competitiveness of world commerce into rationalizing his immoral business pursuits.) He forsakes his love for Eugenie by arranging a marriage of convenience to another girl to increase his social status, revealing himself to be as cold and calculating as his uncle, but Eugenie triumphs in the end through her magnanimity. This is the third Balzac novel I've read, and the third I'd label a masterpiece. Here we have a fascinating study of the interplay between four very strong characters--Old Grandet, his sheltered and naive but soon-to-be-wise daughter, his libertine nephew, and his trusted female servant Nanon, who appears to have the most goodness and common sense of anybody in the story--woven into an elegant tale that has the simplicity and moral lucidity of a fable with the substance of a Shakespearean drama, the work of a playwright at heart who prefers to write in prose. Whether or not it was his intention, Balzac convinces us, with delicious satire instead of tedious didacticism, that there are lessons to be learned from the examples set by flawed as well as virtuous people.

Money, Money, Money

This is the first book I've ever read by Balzac, though first published more than 150 years ago, it goes to show how little human nature has changed, the theme here is greed, and some of the characters in this book stop at nothing in their pursuit of money.The title character is Pere Goriot, an ex-pasta merchant with two daughters who are thoroughly spoiled and self centered; he gave all his money to them when they married in the hope that he would live with them and their rich husbands and be cared for in his old age. Instead his daughters refuse to even receive him in their homes, he has become only an object of shame and derision for them and lives on a pittance in a old boarding house, Maison Vauquer, run by the unforgettable Madame Vauquer, a widow of someone. The main character is Eugene de Rastignac, another boarder at la Maison, a honest (at least at the start) young man from the country whose loving family has toiled and saved to be able to send him to law school in Paris, he is brought into the company of the rich and famous, the creme de la creme of Parisian society and begins to think of another path for himself than the one laid out by his family. Almost everyone of the boarders is living for money, some more willing than others to do anything to obtain it.As I was reading this I kept thinking of what a great stage play this would be, this is a true comic tragedy. It was a little difficult to get into a first, it is a translation and a very old book describing times now gone for good, for me it began to flow more easily after 50 or so pages. I think a modern day look too at Pere Goriot would not leave a reader feeling such pity for him because of his daughters' treatment. He became rich by hoarding food and waiting for a famine to make a financial killing off desperate people, then educated his daughters and brought them up to feel themselves to be ladies and superior to other people, I felt like he deserved a lot of what he got, Rastignac is the one I was more interested in.