On Balzac

I finished reading a translation of Père Goriot a couple weeks ago. It took me six months to read it, even though it is only 250 pages.

I'd had a used hard-bound copy that I acquired years ago. It sat on my shelf for years and then last year it decided it needed to be read. So I read it.

Short summary: Balzac (1799-1850) is amazing. Everything about his writing thwarted my expectations of what he was doing. He sets up story lines that you think will occupy the rest of the book, and then he resolves them in the next two pages, and you are left wondering what the book is about. Who are these characters and what are they doing?

You wonder like that, and you get two thirds of the way through the book, and then---bam---suddenly you know what the story is about. The characters that he has been setting up for all those pages were a gathering storm that erupts out into stories of consequence for the characters, that you probably did did not anticipate in the first fifty pages.

Balzac timeline:

1799 May 20  -- born Honoré Balzac in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France

1819 -- begins writing while living alone at  in the rue Lesdiguières in Paris.

1829-1848 -- La Comédie humaine,  generally viewed as his magnum opus.  multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848). a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life

consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's five theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales

1830 -- Sarrasine  (part of La Comédie humaine)
1834-35 -- Père Goriot (part of La Comédie humaine)

1850 Aug 17 -- died in Paris. age 51.