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Book, 1994
Current format, Book, 1994, 1st ed, No Longer Available.
Book, 1994
Current format, Book, 1994, 1st ed, No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formats
In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, of greed, envy, and despair. Pere Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization - "I loved them too much for them to love me at all" - comes too late. This best-known of Balzac's Comedie humaine novels has all the stylistic elements one might expect: unnerving psychological analyses; vivid physical descriptions, acute observations of the rules governing Parisian society, disarming wit, and unbridled passion. Burton Raffel's translation is responsive to Balzac's style as well as to his words - nothing is suppressed, nothing obfuscated. The result is a highly readable, idiomatic translation of a master storyteller by a master translator.
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