Overview of The Comedy Humaine as a reading project. A must do project for serious literary autodidacts.
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"Balzac’s one-hundred-volume printout of all French society comes in separate packages; the links between the volumes serve as a special reward for the persevering." From Proust's Way A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time by Roger Shattuck.
It bothers me that academic authorities on French literature often get the deminsions of Balzac's La Comedie Humaine so wrong. Of course faced with reading "one hundred volumes" many readers will see themselves as unable to find the time to do this and in doubt whether the time needed to read this is worthwhile.
Here are the components of The Human Comedy
41 Novels. Only a few over 500 pages, most around 250 pages or less
25 short stories - none with a reading time over thirty minutes.
25 Novellas estimated reading time between one to two hours.
If we overestimate for most the reading time of the novels at eight hours each, they would take 328 hours. We will round up to 400. The short stories in total say 15 hours. The Novellas at the top fifty hours. So as a guess 465 hours to read the full cycle. Many book bloggers I follow could read this in three or four months, a number in much less time. In return you have met 2000 very well articulated and described characters, been all over Paris and much of France and a good bit of Italy as well. It is as close to time traveling as you will find. It is also for literary autodidacts a work of tremendous importance. The only non-online work on Balzac I have read, other than the chapter on French Realism in Auerbach and a bit in Ford Madox Ford's The March of Literature is Stefan Zweig's Balzac, which I highly recommend.
As a convenience, you can get the entire cycle as an E book for $2.95 but it means you will be reading older probably in some cases toned down translations. Many of the components do not seem to have modern translations but the top name novels all do and The New York Review of Books has just published new translations of the most famous short stories. Upon completion of my read through I will boldly post The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in Balzac.
"A Prince of Bohemia" is another story structured as one person telling a story to a group of people at a social gathering. Bohemia as a political entity in 1840 is roughly continuous with contemporary Czechoslovakia. The expression "bohemian" comes from the perception in France and elsewhere in the first half of the 19th century that Bohemians were very artistic and intellectual types. Balzac heavily types people based on where they are from. It is a decent story about how a family got rich and how they dealt with the political turmoil in France.
Ambrosia Boussweau
1 comment:
Wow, what an undertaking: I am impressed. Enjoy the remaining works!
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