The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac (1931, A Novel, A Component of The Human Comedy)

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You might ask why is a novel, The Hated Son, set in Italy in the 1530s during the wars of The Medici's doing in The Comedie Humaine, which Balzac intended to portray French society circa 1820 to 1840?  One answer is Balcaz was having good commercial success with the project so he just threw Tne Hated Son along with a few other historical fictions into editions.  Of course there are deeper reasons you can come up with.  Italians have a special place in Balzac's world, perhaps more intense than the French.

As The Hated Son begins a count's much younger wife is giving birth after only seven months.  The count says if the baby, which he demands be a son, is not born healthy he will kill him and his wife.  The son does survive.  The father raises him to be a very "manly" lad, no poetry, no flowers, no sentimentality.  Compressing a bit, the son becomes a military officer and is killed in battle.  The count, whose wife has by now died, remarries and has another son.  Now parts of this seem almost silly in literal retelling.  The son never reached five foot and has blue eyes so naturally he seems disappointingly in masculine to his father who fears he will never provide him a grandson.  The father hates his second son. Of course arranging marriages for children is a very big theme of all literature of the time.  The son falls in love with a woman of great delicacy.  The count has another woman in mind but his people tell him do not even hint at any thing like sex as it will frighten his son from the idea of marriage.  The story line does equate totally how you look with what you are.  A short man is not masculine, a blue eyed one overly sensitive, a woman with large breasts cannot be trusted to be faithful.  The ending is terrible harsh and violent.

I am enjoyed reading The Hated Son.  It is a strange story.  The plot is melodramatic but still fun. 

Mel u

"Massmilla Doni" by Honore de Balzac (1837, A Short Story, A Component of the Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

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The Comedie Humaine consists of 91 works, 41 novels, 25 Novellas, and 25 Short Stories.  Many book bloggers, the world's greatest readers, could climb the mountain iin three dedicated months.  I am now urging this project on all serious literary autodidacts.  

"Massmilla Doni" so far ranks among my best of Balzac.  It is set in Venice.  The plot action centers on an elaborate romance but the greatness of the work is in the account it gives of the role of opera in Ventian society and the very illuminating theorizing on the nature of music.  There is just a huge amount to be learned from this.  As I read the story I listened to Don Giovanni, the opera most talked about in the story and I will say that Balzac has, I think, greatly advanced my understanding of opera.   One reason I like to read on my IPAD is that I can simultaneously listen through I Tunes Radio to almost any sort of music to accompany my reading.   

The story goes into a lot of detail about the immense social importance of the Opera in Venice.  I did not know that the grandest boxes were owned by families.  Of course Balzac goes into the use of opera boxes for romantic purposes.

In Balzac and in English contemporaries, Venice is a city of exotic escape, where you can do things perhaps not fully approved of back home.  What Rio de Jinerro might represent today in the imagination of someone from London, Paris or Toronto was in the 1830s in Europe played by Venice.  This  fascination fextended up until almost W W Two in English literature in the writings of writers like D. H. Lawrence and E. F. Forester.

Balzac generalizes about how Italian women are different from French, and such but we accept it from him when we might laugh if done today.

For sure "Massmilla Domi" is very much worth reading as a stand alone book.  It is valuable  reading  as a text in musical appreciation and cultural history.