Balzac - Softcover

V.S. Pritchett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0517550253 ISBN 13: 9780517550250

Publisher: Harmony Books, 1983

Synopsis

Honore de Balzac, with his monumental legacy, the "Comedie Humaine" (an unsurpassed picture of French society from the rise and fall of Napoleon to the Revolution), was one of the founding geniuses among the world's great novelists. Pritchett presents a life-size portrait of the man inside the artist, the exhuberant, uncouth provincial who combined encyclopaedic knowledge with the life of an exhibitionist and would-be dandy. He was a gourmet, a disastrous financial speculator, successful pursuer of aristocratic women, a born salesman and an untiring traveller. Yet, with some truth, Balzac called himself a monk, working 16 hours a day fuelled by an ocean of strong coffee. Balzac's life can be followed through his enormous correspondence with his family, the women he loved and, above all, with Madame Hanska, an imperious Polish countess. Employing his own novelist's eye for the scene, Pritchett shows us Balzac in the Parisian swim of the 1830s and 40s, the city of Louis Phillip, Daumier, Delacroix and the Romantics, with its contradictory day-dreams of Oriental sensuality, religious mysticism and bourgeois respectability, as the Industrial Revolution began to take hold. --This text refers to an this Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Balzac was a man who turned all his life into words. From his extensive correspondence with his family, with the women he loved and above all, with Madame Hanska, the imperious Polish Countess, and with a novelist?s eye for scene, Pritchett shows us Balzac in the Parisian swim of the 1830s and ?40s - the Paris of Louis Phillippe, Daumier, Delacroix and the Romantics.

About the Author:

V.S. Pritchett was a novelist, short-story writer, critic and traveller. He was the leading critic of the New Statesman.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harmony Books
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0517550253
• ISBN 13: 9780517550250
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272