Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet

As I do every month, last Tuesday I led the discussion at the Found in Translation book group at The Booksmith in San Francisco. (If you’re in the area and want to join us, we’re reading Bernardo Atxaga next.) We were reading Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac, my first entry into the Frenchman’s monumental (and incomplete) Comedie Humaine.

Rumpus editor Jeremy Hatch is one of the group’s members, and he wrote up some highly interesting impressions of Grandet and Balzac.

It’s funny, though; I barely remember anything about the novels themselves even though I read them with such enthusiasm, and my “second” reading of Eugénie Grandet was pretty much my first. All that I really remembered of the book was the stripped-down nature of the whole narrative, the simplicity of the characters, the way it seemed to drive forward like a classical tragedy, and the relative absence of the things I think of as most characteristic of Balzac: a profusion of character, incident, and parallel plots, in a story set in the heart of Paris. I remembered thinking of it as being relatively unlike the other novels of his I had read. Eugénie Grandet is set in the provinces, concerns only about a half-dozen characters, and there’s just one plotline: the tyrannical, miserly ways of Eugénie’s father end by corrupting and ruining everyone within his influence, an influence that reaches far beyond the grave to set the entire outcome of his daughter’s life.

Indeed. After reading Franco Moretti on Balzac I’d been prepared for something a little more complex than Grandet. Not that the book isn’t complex, but that from what I’ve seen some of Balzac’s other novels–Pere Goriot, for example–are a little more cosmopolitan in their juxtaposition of various social strata all existing in Paris in the early 1800s.

But that’s not to say that the book wasn’t charming by its own measure. It has a very shapely plot, and Balzac gets in a lot of mordant irony, particularly when parsing the encounter between the provinces and the center of all known existence (i.e. Paris). Going by Grandet, I’d definitely like to read more of Balzac’s immense portrait of post-Napoleonic France, and it seems that you can get it all for free in translation from Gutenberg.