Eugenie Grandet (The Human Comedy) by Honoré de Balzac (Epub)

Description

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics. In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugénie’s own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugénie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac’s Comédie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice. M. A. Crawford’s lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac’s characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

User’s Reviews

The love of money and a passionate pursuit of it are seen as a driving force in post-Revolutionary France, and are studied in detail in the character of Grandet. About the Author The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Perfect. Or as close to perfection as Balzac gets. The opening 22-page section is a master class for any aspiring novelist in how to set the scene, introduce the characters, suggest the conflicts, reveal the theme, set a whole fictional world spinning on its axis, all with an economy of means as present here as it is absent from the exasperating PERE GORIOT.Characters are distinct individuals and thus an unsolvable mystery to others as well as themselves. Yet each gets his or her due – even the miser whose avarice is a logical alternative to the religious fanaticism of wife and daughter. When he sings and dances a jig after cornering gold, we happily join in! Novel stands or falls, of course, with the characterization of Eugenie: it is flawless. A portrayal of a young woman besieged by passion for the first time – how it consumes her, elates her, debases her, destroys her – is rendered with such psychological accuracy, such telling detail, such delicacy of touch and subtlety of shading, even at times with such humor, that the encomiums about Balzac that sometimes puzzle us finally ring true:”In Balzac, every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will.”Baudelaire”Balzac’s great glory is that he pretended hardest.”James”The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac’s.”Wilde

⭐ This is the second novel by Balzac I have read (Old Goriot the first) and I am quickly becoming a fan. I am looking forward to reading Cousin Bette. I agree with another reviewer who found it difficult to believe that Eugenie could fall so deeply in love with her cousin after one meeting. One might also wonder why the book was titled after Eugenie since the majority of the novel focused on her disgustingly greedy father. Eugnie did not become the main character until the last fourth of the novel. That aside, this is a good story and I enthusiastically recommend it.

⭐ I don’t know how many folks read Balzac these days. If one wanted to try one of his novels, this would be the one to try. It is not difficult to read and is not long. I have read a number of his novels and this was one of the best. If you do not care for this book, there is probably little point in trying the others.

⭐ Too detailed for my liking.The story was a depressing one.The translation was not always the best. Sometimes it seemed too literal.

⭐ The Everyman edition was pictured, but there was an entirely different edition that arrived.

⭐ Excellent

⭐ If you didn’t dig anything else Balzac penned, you won’t like this either.Good setting, a little like a travel brochure in a couple of places, but overall..I like it.

⭐ A short character study by the great French master of manners and the human heart. Not to be missed!! The downfall of a miser and his daughter’s attempt to make recompense.

⭐ Penguin has commissioned new Balzac translations. Why? To be update? But Balzac is not writing now, and the translation, though now over half a century old, is more than serviceable. It is superb, offering perfect timing for Balzac’s wonderful sentences, ironic and often funny. No more out of date than Balzac.

⭐ DETERMINISTIC

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