Amazon Review...
When you're trying to educate yourself without the service of an academic advisor, you still need something to point you in a profitable direction. Sixty years ago I was groping around for a reading regimen and one book on the subject (I don't remember the title) declared that although Tolstoy's War and Peace was "the world's greatest novel," Balzac (1799-1850) was "the world's greatest novelist." OK. I went ahead and spent a couple years reading Tolstoy but I never got round to Balzac. That is, until quite recently.
It was David Harvey who woke me up. In the introduction to his Companion to Marx's Capital (Verso, 2010) he said that Marx was a great admirer of Balzac and had the ambition to some day write a full study of la Comedie humaine. Unfortunately for people who love classic novels, Marx never finished his work on Capital and so was never able to get seriously into his great love of French literature! Harvey hadn't read much Balzac but he said that later, when reading one of his novels, "I found myself often saying, 'Ah, that's where Marx got it from!'"
Its hard to know where to start with Balzac, but I picked up the Oxford World Classics edition of Pere Goriot (1834), probably the most widely read of his books. It's a bit formidable for someone like myself who seldom reads novels and likes things short and simple. Balzac's paragraphs in Pere Goriot often run to 800 words and his chapters to 75 or 80 pages. Not a good format for my short attention span, but when I finally mustered the courage to begin, I soon saw why he ranks so high among the world's writers.
Balzac quickly draws you into the world of a rundown, flea-bitten boarding house and its inmates, and on into their lives and relations with each other and early nineteenth century Paris. What drove those lives is a principle theme of the book, and that theme is money. From the translator's introduction, it is the humiliation of having too little, the obsession with acquiring more, and the moral bankruptcy of a society that defines all human relations in its terms. I hadn't turned many pages before it was clear to me why Marx had been so fond of Balzac.
Near the beginning of the book Balzac says, "let me tell you, this drama is not fiction or romance, all is true. It is so true," he continued, "that everyone can recognize its elements in his own circle, perhaps in his own heart." That's what novels are about, aren't they? To make us recognize the truth of things? This one does it.