Balzac: A Life - Hardcover

Illuminating Balzac more successfully through examining his work than his era, Robb attempts to unravel the novelist's prolific, debt-driven career, his disorderly pursuit of fame and love, and his instinct for financial trouble. Born to an eccentric, self-made peasant father and a much younger petty bourgeoise mother, Honor‚ de Balzac is credited with developing Realism in the French novel, epitomized in La Com‚die humaine, which is comprised of over 100 works and some 2,000 characters. Robb, a scholar of 19th-century French literature, lucidly addresses Balzac's less impressive early literary attempts at classical tragedy and gothic and sentimental novels. His first successes, after failed ventures in publishing and printing, were a historical novel and a smartly cynical marital guide derived from his gutter journalism. His notoriety was secured (but never his loans), and La Com‚die humaine later materialized as the unfinishable project of his life: an enormous fresco of his epoch's every aspect, from Paris to the provinces, through the spheres of finance, politics, journalism, and law. Less interested in the post-Napoleonic age, which the novelist both embodied and scandalized, Robb shadows Balzac's obsessions with all the current fads, such as mesmerism, Orientalism, railway speculation, and the cult of the mad genius (e.g., he wrote wearing a monk's robe). By a combination of literary success and social climbing, the novelist also worked his way through an increasingly aristocratic set of older mistresses. (Robb suggests homosexual liaisons with literary secretaries-collaborators, a contested point among both the 19th-century press and later biographers.) Ironically, his great love was a married Ukrainian countess, Eveline Hanska, who stayed loyal to the unreliable Balzac, maintaining an almost 20-year relationship (mainly epistolary), and married him at the end of his life. Robb's Balzac, however manic and obsessive, could separate himself from the fictional world of La Com‚die while creating a character for his fame to inhabit and a genuine melodrama for his life. (Photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Balzac we meet in British scholar Robb's extraordinary biography is a mass of contradictions. A "rational mystic," the founder of the modern documentary novel embraced superstitions and scorned science as a glorified form of cataloguing. Chronicler of the urban proletariat, Honore Balzac (1799-1850) snobbishly added the "de" to his name, claiming wholly improbable descent from nobility. Defender of the family, he had at least one illegitimate child and many erotic adventures. Just five months before his death, he married Polish countess Eveline Hanska, whom he courted by correspondence for 15 years. We meet Balzac the bankrupt printer-publisher, blaming his ruin on his hated creditor--his mother; the treasure hunter seeking ancient silver mines in Sardinia; the sufferer from temporary insanity and aphasia. Without resorting to psychobiography, Robb elucidates the seething inner life of a titan and gives us a Balzac for our time who seems presciently modern in his attempt to remake reality through his fiction. Unfortunately, the work is only lightly sprinkled with commentary on Balzac's writing. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.