Balzac's Lives [Paperback]

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.

Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.“At the heart of Peter Brooks’s new book on Balzac lies an intense competition between two opposite kinds of writing: Criticism and the Novel. The author’s goal—to show us how Balzac’s Human Comedy makes sense of human and social nature—belongs to Criticism, but his means—writing biographies of Balzac’s characters, mere figments of imagination—are pure Novel. Though these twice-told tales are amply interleaved with critical and social context, narrative analysis and psychoanalytic insight, the contest between critical reading and novelistic telling hardly ends in a draw. Brooks not only likes a good story, he knows how to tell one, expert in retracing even the most tortuous paths of Balzac’s human comedians. The inordinate, almost fierce energy that animates every line here is the passion of a storyteller—that primal passion for staging twists and turns of pl£b