Book Description
Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comedie humaine, besides scores of other tales and articles. Short forms appear early in Balzac's output, and shape his work throughout his career. Balzac's Shorter Fictions looks at the whole of this corpus, at the nature of short fiction, and at how Balzac's novels developed from his stories - at the links between literary genesis and genre. It explores the roles of short fiction in Balzac's creation, its part in producing effects of virtuality and perspective, and reflects ultimately on the relationship between brevity and length in La Comedie humaine.This, the first complete English-language study of Balzac's work for over forty years, synthesizes recent research on Balzac's practice within the context of modern thought on the author. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

New insights into the novel.
The book is interesting, lively, original, witty and provocative...a remarkable work and an impressive contribution to critical debates on the novel.David Daiches Blurb ... Read more

Book Description
This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing nineteenth-century expectations of what novels should be like. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The price of social climbing
Superbly written view of the class struggle in 19th century Paris. Goriot buys his daughters up in social standing with their doweries but pays even more dearly in the end. As the suspense builds so does the realization of the inevitable outcome. Balzac presents a realistic view of the era, at times funny and at times full of promise but in the end squarely melancolic. The dialogue is crisp. Definitely worth the read. ... Read more

Book Description
No descriptive material is available for this title. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (7)

BORING ARGUMENTS ABOUT ART
The effect of reading the two short works in this book is one of overhearing two snobbish and conceited intellectuals arguing about painting and music in a wanna-be hip cafe. Being that, The Unknown Masterpiece is not only annoying, it's boring. Set in Paris in 1612, a young unproven painter named Nicolas Poussin has come to the city to make a name for himself by studying under the great master Frenhofer. Frenhofer has been holed up in his studio for years working on his great masterwork, a portrait of a woman who he has disturbingly started referring to as his wife. The problem is that he hasn't found a suitable model for him to be able to finish the work. "Gambara", the novella that is also in this book, also concerns an artist that can never quite find the X-factor that would allow him to finish his work. Signor Gambara is a composer of music, whose grand operas come out as random noise to all those that listen, except when he's drunk, then his music turns beautiful, as if he can only communicate his divine music when his conscious mind is gone. A young playboy Count is meanwhile trying to steal Gambara's beautiful wife Marianna.

This book was awful and is a poor example of Balzac's genius. Even for his big fans like me. I don't know why Richard Howard even went to the trouble of translating this. Supposedly "Masterpiece" has had a profound effect on painters like Picasso who identified with the character Frenhofer. So what? It's just the same blithering romantic notion of capturing the unattainable that we've heard for centuries. "Gambara" is even worse. In a normal Balzac work, he would have focused on the characters of the Count and the Gambaras, but here he focuses on chord names and arguments and analyses of operas that I had to literally slog through with my eyes. If these had been longer pieces I would not have finished the book. Steer clear. It's a shame because probably only about 10% of Balzac's novels are available in English so why waste time printing this sub-minor work?

If you want to see Balzac's true genius, check out any of the Penguin editions of his works.

Artists are not gods
Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece is not about abstract art! It is about the destructive power of obsession for perfection. The artist Frenhofer over-paints and touches-up his masterpiece until it is not recognizable as anything but a mess. Balzac's Gambarra was too wordy but it does have the interesting theme of an artist, totally consumed by his personal vision, and thus not able to recognize the sacrifices and motivations of those around him. He writes an opera about the beginnings of Islam and the sacrifice of a woman for the man she loves. Yet Gambarra can not see this same pattern being played out with his wife and thus his single minded vision destroys his marriage. He is both a genius and a fool. His atonal compositions were 100 years before their time.His inability to empathize and get out of his own visions results in his wife's running off with an Italian count who plots to steal Gambarra's wife after he sees the composer's Achille's heel.I don't think I would recommend these books to anyone but artists.They reveal the artistic feet of clay which we so often overlook.

Great Tales About Artists Struggling To Create Masterpieces
At first glance "The Unknown Masterpiece" and "Gambarra" are dissimilar tales about a painter and a composer. Yet they share in common the main protagonist's struggle to make a masterpiece; the finest painting and opera ever conceived. Unfortunately in "The Unknown Masterpiece" the painter Frenhofer is so dissatisfied with his work that he paints it anew, and it is seen by his friends, with disastrous consequences for all. In "Gambarra" the composer of the same name struggles to finish an opera on the early history of Islam, which he promises will be more glorious than any by Mozart. Such lofty ambitions remain unrealized, leaving the composer impoverished. Without question two of the greatest tales ever written by Balzac, influencing generations of painters, writers and other artists.

The birth of the modern
It's amazing that the author was able to create an essay on 20th century abstract art in 1834.But this story is much more than that.It is a commentary on the parallels between art and human psychology, and the unreality of both... also, a character study, a mystery, an allegorical tale... all within 40 pages.In keeping with its theme, The Unknown Masterpiece is, on the other hand, none of those things.In keeping with its title... at least in this country.

A writer expressing the life of the artist
I dig Balzac telling us about his views of art through the stories of a painter ("The Unknown Masterpiece") and a musician ("Gambara"). You can't go wrong with this one. Terrific translation; I wish I read French well enough to dig the original. ... Read more

Book Description
In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form.

The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey’s account of the novelist’s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works—Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes—demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac’s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac’s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Gay families weren't born yesterday.
If your'e interested in French literature or Balzac, you'll like this book -- it's clearly written and offers a fascinating account of Balzac as a sociological novelist who was interested in how new forms of family took shape in the 19th century.But this is also required reading for anyone interested in the history of marriage and kinship, because Lucey shows that in the 1830s and 1840s, France was already debating what forms of the family were legitimate and what role same-sex relations would have to the relatively new Civil Code.A learned, gracefully written book that will teach you something genuinely new! ... Read more