Old Goriot (The Human Comedy)

I had four days to read this for a class, so I budgeted my time and decided to read around 70 pages a day. But this book was so enjoyable that I couldn't put it down, and I ended up reading 90 pages on the first day and the remaining 190 on the second. This is an engrossing story of devotion, betrayal, ambition, humility, crime, and innocence, told at a pleasantly brisk pace and peppered with profound observations on human nature. Goriot, Rastignac, and Vautrin are amazing characters, right up there with the creations of Dickens and Shakespeare. As for the translation, I don't know French and therefore can't judge Henry Reed's faithfulness to Balzac's expression. But as English, Reed's prose is flawless.

"To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter." Euripides "Noble natures cannot long endure this world. How indeed should deep and noble feeling find a place in such a shallow, petty, mean society?" p. 282 "Old Goriot" This classic novel by Balzac simply busted up my heart. It's so depressing; that reading it was the like watching the last half hour of "Brian's Song" times twenty. Ergo, anyone who tends to be on the soft-hearted, extremely sensitive side, beware my fellow friends, because this one is sure to draw a few tears. Especially if you are a father! Now a few words about the story itself: The main protagonist, an altruistic, gentle, saint of a man 'Old Goriot' is a widower with two adult daughters. Old G. resides in a seedy boarding house in the slums of Paris. He rents out a tiny, filthy, dank room, one of the worst the shanty has to offer. He is getting on in years, and because of his quiet, simple, child-like nature, along with the fact that he is practically broke, he suddenly finds himself to be the butt of jokes by his fellow housemates. However, there is definitely an air of mystery regarding this old soul. For it was not too long ago that this simpleton was once a very successful businessman who made quite a fortune in his earlier days. Now at the same time Old G. is living this sad, lonely life of a pauper, his two beautiful young daughters are basking in the sunlight of bourgeoisie Paris society. They are both in loveless marriages to wealthy, amoral men. However, both women came into their nuptials with quite a large dowry to boot due to their overly generous father who absolutely adores his daughters beyond definition and has spoiled them rotten ever since they were little girls. Both of his daughters are pretentious, self-absorbed, petty, ungrateful brats. Whatever their husbands deny them, they simply run off to daddy and he always happily grants them their every wish despite its personal cost to him. And King Lear thought he had it bad! Another main character in this rather tearful tale is a young, noble, highly ambitious law student named Rastignac who is also one of the boarders at the sty in which Old G. resides. He comes to the big City of Lights from a poor, farming family in the South of France and quickly tries to immerse himself into the elite of Paris society, mainly because he's smitten with ... I'm stopping myself here, in order to not relate too much. I would also be remiss to omit mentioning another fascinating character by the name of Vautrin who also lives in the same boarding house as Old G. and Rastignac (two characters that play active roles in other Balzac stories). All in all, the essential themes of this compelling classic are just as relevant today as they were in Paris in 1834. It's all about love and money, the two obsessions that seem to make this crazy world go round and round. Balzac's prose is loaded with wit which does help alleviate some of the

Getting involved in the works of Balzac is like entering a magnificently equipped library with an insatiable appetite for books. His output was prodigious: novels, short stories, and essays, but it is primarily the HUMAN COMEDY for which he is best known. The complexity that is that book had its origins much earlier in his novel FATHER GORIOT (PERE GORIOT). Balzac liked to move characters back and forth from book to book like chess pieces. In much of his fiction, he places his characters in cities like Paris that are center of dissolution and corruption that test their moral mettle. Most often they fail, but it is in their failures that give his work their distinctive flavor. Father Goriot is an old, sick pensioner who has raised his two daughters improperly such that they now return his earlier parental errors with daughterly ingratitude that elevates him to the status of a wounded Lear. He lives in a boarding house on the third floor, the cheapest floor. He had once been able to avoid the more expensive lower, but as he has given far too much of his dwindling resources to his greedy daughters, he is now facing poverty. This boarding house is a bustling center of activity, with Goriot only one part. A young and money hungry lawyer Eugene de Rastignac lives there too. He is handsome, witty, and definitely willing to bend a few rules to advance in the cesspool that is Parisian society. Eugene becomes the lover to one of Goriot's wealthy daughters, hoping that she can open doors to him that might otherwise have been closed. This daughter Delphine is only slightly less mercenary than her sister Anastasie, with whom Delphine is not on speaking terms. A friend of Eugene, Vautrin, who is aware of Eugene's poverty, offers to kill the brother of a woman that Eugene is dating, thus ensuring that in the event of a marriage, Eugene will marry into money. The primary focus of the story is on the disintegrating relation between Goriot and his daughters. They take his money until there is no more. For his part, Goriot remains inexplicably oblivious to their machinations. When he dies, both daughters find reasons not to attend the funeral which only Eugene attends. FATHER GORIOT is a novel of pessimism. It is not an unpleasant read, just an unpleasant topic, yet in Balzac's dramatic portrayal of the origins and consequences of greed and betrayal, it shows the depths to which people may plunge, while an uncaring city does little more than sit back and not take notice.

Goriot is an unscrupulous pasta merchant who amasses a fortune and manages to get his two beloved daughters married to wealthy men. To accomplish that, he gives away all his money to the daughters, who turn out to despise their father for his humble origin. They turn him away, forbidding him to live wtih them, and so he moves to a flophouse. Pain and poverty consume the man, who lives in the small world of the boarding house. There, he befriends Eugene de Rastignac, a naive young man aspiring to climb in the upper society of frivolous Paris. Vautrin, a regular in Balzac's novels, is an ex-con with a great and mysterious personality, and with a past. Rastignac becomes the lover of one of Goriot's daughters, an affair which only leads to misery. Goriot will die lonely and poor, his life destroyed by pain and a profound sadness inflicted on him by his beloved daughters. This is one of Balzac's best books, a deep portrait of the misery of the human condition as well as a depiction of the decadent society of Paris in the 19 century. Note that Paris' dcadence is in no way exclusive to that place or age, just as the human condition hasn't changed much since. Balzac was a master writer, and this novel is an excellent example of what he could do with words. A must for literature lovers.

In May 2000 I stood hat in hand at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris paying my respects to a giant named Honore de Balzac. His masterpiece, PERE GORIOT, has resonated across over 30 years since that happy moment in 1968 when I first sat down to dine at Mme de Vauquer's boarding house, since I first heard the whispered confidences of Mme de Nucingen and the sighs of the Duchesse de Langeais, and since I first ran into that master criminal Vautrin. Balzac was at the same time an extraordinarily ambitious man and one who knew the limits of fame and fortune. For years he chased his Polish countess, and no sooner did he win and marry her than he fell ill and died. I would like to think that there was a smirk on his face as he saw the irony: He was himself a character in a Balzac novel, a composite of all his characters -- whether of the court or the hovel, from bankers to ragpickers, high and low. On the surface, this is a modern day version of Lear: An old man gives everything to his ambitious daughters and dies. The focus of the story, however, is no more on Papa Goriot and his daughters than on all the other characters in the story: the ambitious Rastignac, the plotting Vautrin, the good Dr. Bianchon, the clueless Victorine, the struggling Delphine de Nucingen -- all are caught in a web. (As was Balzac.) This book changed the way I see the world. It can do no less for you. It is as if, suddenly, the mist that hides the motives of men parts, and we see the world of men as it really is, with all the marionette strings tangled up as each puppet strives to claw its way toward the top.