Download Balzac: A Biography Narrated By Graham Robb Released As Text

biographies are flawed in the relationship between author and subject, It's a flaw if the author is overawed by the subject and a flaw if the author obviously despises the subject, It's also a flaw when the author uses the subject's life particularly in literary biography mainly to demonstrate the author's own deep perspicacity, There appear to be very few Boswells in the world, In other words, authors who are invigorated and refreshed by their love and respect for their subject,

Which is all by the by when it comes to Graham Robb on Balzac, Because Graham Robb, to me at least, has found the perfect medium between all of these extremes of failure, Robb's knowledge of his subject is complete, including not only Balzac's life but of Balzac's work and all criticism of Balzac's work, And Robb's treatment of his subject's life combines a very judicious balance of deep respect and sufficient irony to convince us that Robb has an appropriate perspective on the essential humanness even of great writers.


It's always hard, I'd imagine, to conceive of a world without numerous aspects we take for granted, Balzac's own physical Paris, so important in all his works set in the capital, was almost entirely different from the Paris we know and have known for many generations, even if only from famous impressionist paintings.
To get a feel for the old Paris, the preHaussmann Paris, one has to seek out the rare copies of Marville's photographs, What we see in Marville's work are narrow, dark, medieval lanes and alleys, filthy, crumbling, stone shacks hundreds of years old and the disappearing remains ofth Century broadsides painted onto the flaking walls of ancient, blackened warehouses and stables.


Balzac's Paris, the Paris so welldescribed and represented in his novels, consisted of an infinite assortment of, on the one hand, this dim, poor, threatening and oppressive public reality, and, on the other, the entirely hidden though not in the case of the Palais Royale world of incredible private luxury gilded and green with entirely private gardens.
There is a substantial element of Balzac's work that can only be appreciated with that kind of to us incredible visual contrast between the luxury of the rich and the deprivation of the poor kept strongly in mind.
We too, of course, are working hard at reachieving that same kind of contrast today, though in our case the luxury is even more hidden than it was in Balzac's Paris.


Robb continually demonstrates his

awareness of all of these subtle aspects of Balzac's works, whether generally or in specific novels, bringing them to the fore as and when appropriate.
I had never before appreciated the extent to which Balzac entirely subjected his own personal life to the demands of his chosen profession, Twelve years devoted to teaching himself how to write, And then a literary career that took far more than its reasonable share of his existence for the creation of the Comedie Humaine, Then death atwhile his father had lived almost to ninety, Are there as many selfdestructs in American or British literary history as there are in French

Robb's book is a "good" read, as opposed to a "fun" read.
There's no sense at all in even beginning the book if you don't have at least some feeling for a few of Balzac's masterpieces, I'd say, minimum, Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet and La Cousine Bette, For me, La Cousine Bette corresponds in a way to Bleak House for Dickens as a career landmark, As for Balzac himself, well, does anyone really need encouragement Balzac is I think one of those universal literary no one can disregard without seriously depriving themselves of a major pleasure.
Maybe the most difficult literary biography I have read both in terms of the task that Graham Robb undertook, and also the reading itself, Honore de Balzac was an exceedingly complicated man who wrote an exceedingly consequential oeuvre, I have read six books of Balzac's works: 'The Wrong Side of Paris', 'Lost Illusions', 'Père Goriot', 'Cousin Bette', 'Eugenie Grandet,' and a selection of some dozen pieces from 'The Human Comedy.
' Not enough to even remotely claim any mastery of Balzac's works, but I am guessing representative, and it seems, containing some of his most prized stories.


Robb is to be credited with combining Balzac's life, personal and professional, with the contents of his writings, Here is athcentury author who sought to represent the life of France based on some,fictional characters, many of which show up in several different stories over the two decades of Balzac's literary production.
And the variety of his story plots and settings is prodigious, Robb describes a manic, flawed genius, A person who never got out of massive amounts debt, had somelove affairs, consumed coffee by the gallon, and finally died atof so many maladies that "cause of death" can't really be precisely known today.


Robb's 'Balzac: A Biography' has a useful Index of Works at the back which allows the reader to look up the English translations of the titles of Balzac'sstories and novels, which are printed in French throughout the text.
For this reader I would have preferred to see the English titles in the body, instead of having to flip back to the Index each time, but I understand his decision I finally stopped looking the titles up and just went with the flow.


'Balzac: A Biography' helped me see this famous author and his works in a more complete light, Robb is to be congratulated for his achievement, Before you read Balzac, or this biography, read "Germinal" by Zola, This will keep you from being swept under the romantic spell ofth century literary life, Peasants and workers do not figure greatly in Balzac's novels, or in this bio, Today, we have to keep in mind the millions who die in Congo mining for the coltan that makes our computers and phones possible, So, too, we have to remember the miners depicted in "Germinal" whose suffering and exploitation paid for the furs, jewelry, mansions, fine furniture and fine art that Balzac strove to surround himself with.


Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx loved Balzac for his spoton depiction of capitalism and the decadent life of the bourgeoisie, It's quite fascinating to read about what Balzac had to do to make it as a writer in postRevolutionary Paris, It's exactly what goes on today, And capitalism continues to birth the same kind of writers: haecks, flacks, plagiarists, hagiographers, and the occasional rebel and genius, Balzac was, of course the enfante terrible and genius, But he was an Absolutist who hated the masses, That also made him a racist who, like his character Vautrin, would have liked nothing better than to own slaves in the United States and retire on the profits.
Hard to pin down Balzac but Robb did a good job, The great French writer gets out of hand, He becomes too much to handle, His writing life overflows in ways which defy experience, The man worked himself into an early grave but also managed to be everywhere and meet everyone, It hardly seems possible that his great project, the series of fifty something novels depicting every aspect of French society, La Comédie humaine, could have been written in such a chaotic life.
Balzac managed to get himself spectacularly in debt at an early age and then spent the rest of his days writing himself out of the hole he had made.
Debtor's prison was always a few missed payments away, Much like Dostoevsky. An awful way to live,

A truly fascinating life and a highly recommended biography, A generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail, Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subject, his literature andth century France, It is a birth to death story that takes until about pageof small print for Balzac to write what was essentially the first book under his name, The Last of the Chouans, around age.
over the nextyears of Balzacs lifeandpages of the biographyhe writes what there is of the Comedie Humaine, Robb does a great job rescuing Balzac from some of the myths that have encrusted around him, showing how he worked lots of coffee and writing aboutwords a minute from late night until morning, how he handles his debts, his travels, and his many different failed schemes for work as a printer, playwright and more.
He also shows his relationship with Eveline Hanska in great detail, the nearlyyears of correspondence followed by less than a half year of marriage.
Remarkable, onefifth of Balzacs writing in the last five years of his life was to Hanska making it, as Balzac says, like another one of Balzacs novels.
What emerges is a writer who invented the concept of an overlapping work populated by recurring characters, more thanof them, and through revisions and rerevisions brought an increasing coherence to this fictional world, creating a form of realism that helped to rescue literature from the romanticism that pervaded it at the time.
I have not read Balzac, I'v but read Grahm Robb, Very colorful, stylish treatment of a larger than life figure, I am left a bit curious about the intellectual development of Balzac, This turn towards fiction is, for me, an attempt to mine the novels and biographies for insights into people and how they can be understood/helped/educated.
This biography and Pere Goriot, by Balzac, both contribute, The Signet Classics edition of Pere is much easier to read than the other translations I have found, so be aware of that issue, Balzac's characters are complex and numerous enough that you are not likely to run out of things to read, Balzac only lived to about the age of, so what he accomplished is amazing in that light, He may have written, in some spurts, for aboutout ofhours at a stretch, No writer's block there. He read one of Dickens' early stories, so that's an interesting tie in, I knew that it was a good idea to get expensive stuff for your love, but I didn't know what to say to go along with it.
Here, for your benefit, is Honore hence, Nore Balzac's version: "'You are my whim, my passion, by vice, . . my mistress, my comrade, my louploup, my brother, my conscience, my happiness and my wife, and you must also be the object of my follies.
. . for you are all my hope and all my life, If only you knew how carefully I am arranging everything!' 'And when you see it, you will say, "What, Nore, is that all it cost"'" Looks like all three quotation marks the middle one singleare warranted at the end.
Anyone who knows better, please let me know, 'Twas adequately written at best, I think when writing a biography you really should focus more on an organized, well written collection of facts, Instead, this author chose to spend too much time trying to be a half ass Freudian analyst whilst attempting to play the detectiveyears after the fact about very minor, minor facts.
The reality is that academics should usually stick to writing useless papers keeping up their tenure instead of trying to be "artistes, " The real savior of this book is that when old Balzac peers out from the pages, his genius is sweet redemption, One of my alltime favorite snippets from history is in this book, Robb is noting how Balzac hired fellow writer Henri de Latouche, who had helped the author move into his new digs, to hang his wallpaper, a skill for which de Latouche apparently had great talent.
This came in handy given Balzac was intent on creating an apartment fit for a literary king, In a rather snarky moment, Robb wrote, “In choosing the paper, cutting it to size and fitting it to all the difficult angles, Latouches genius blossomed as it rarely did in his work.
” Ouch! I read this book in order to do research for an essay in my book “The Modern Salonnière,” and I have excerpted this particular essay here: sitelink ly/JYUgnu I found this book disappointing, At first I appreciated Robbs interpretation of the events in the life of Balzac, A good biography is more than a collection of facts and statisticsit puts that information into context and perspective for the reader, I also initially liked how the author used his familiarity with Balzacs fiction to flesh out events and get into the head of his subject.
However, Robbs frequent interjection of his own conjecture and psychoanalysis of Balzac muddled the details of the biography, and it bothered me enough that I stopped reading about twothirds of the way through.
I already have the basic Balzac story from another biography, and felt like those essentials occasionally got lost in the Robbs commentarythey sometime interrupted and obscured the chain of events.
Still, Id recommend this bio to any hardcore Balzac fansthey would probably enjoy the authors investigations and side trips,

sitelinkBalzac: A Biographyappears to be Robbs first biographical work, I am eighty pages into his biography of Victor Hugo, and it is much better than his work on Balzacthe authors interpretation of events is less frivolous and more concise.

i like Balzac more than ever now and I'm afraid i have to go back and read the human comedy again with my new found understanding.
and the letters. In the first major English biography of Honore de Balzac for over fifty years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his selfdestructive tendencies.
As colorful as the world he described, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography: a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes a passionate collector, inventor, explorer, and political campaigner a mesmerizing storyteller with the power to make his fantasies come true.
Balzac's early life was a struggle against literary disappointment and poverty, and he learned his trade by writing a series of lurid commercial novels, Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of harebrained entrepreneurial schemes which took him to the remotest parts of Europe and into a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence.
Out of these experiences emerged some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition, Skillfully interweaving the life with the novels, Robb presents Balzac as one of the great tragicomic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and still is, immense.
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