Mopping Up The Gravy

[poliphilo]

I'm coming to the end of Balzac- by which I mean I've exhausted the resources of our local library. Thus far I've read:

Eugenie Grandet
Pere Goriot
Le Peau de Chagrin
Illusions Perdues
Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes
Cousine Bette
Cousin Pons.

Which leaves some eighty titles- many of them unavailable in modern English translation. Balzac is tremendous. Superhuman. I really don't know how one man managed to do (and know) so much.

Mind you, a good number of those eighty titles are short stories. The two books I borrowed on our last visit to the library (when I met an old girlfriend working at the tourist information desk- which was nice) contain fourteen. 

When I've finished with them I'll be saying adieu to the great man and moving onto Zola. 

Comments

[saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com]

Zola is fascinating - a kind of French Charles Dickens.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Earth, sweat, semen, coal, sweat, pox, sweat, coal, brutes, sweat, semen, coal ....get ready for Zola.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

O....K.....

At least the moral corruption can't possibly be any worse than it is in Balzac.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

A different kind of evil ...poverty, pragmatism, desperation, brute indifference... not so queasy but just as awful.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I used to be a fan of G.K Chesterton- who regarded Zola as the AntiChrist.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Being such an arch-papist, he probably thought the same of Beatrix Potter.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He writes somewhere that Zola was worse than the Holy Inquisition - because the Inquisition only tortured men physically (and for their own good) whereas Zola tortured them "morally".

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Indeed, but then he was a bit of a pompous, pious prat who in intellectual and moral terms was a gnat in comparison to Zola.

While Chestertone was agonizing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, Zola was making heroic, historic interventions to reveal massive political corruption and scandalous treatment of powerless people in powerful prose. I don't think they should be mentioned in the same breath.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Chesterton had a lively mind that ossified with age.

He hated political corruption and plutocracy- so in some respects he and Zola were on the same side.

The Father Brown stories were among the first grown-up things I read (that theme again) and I can't help loving him for that.

Also he had a great way with one-liners.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Tried him, didn't like him, couldn't understand the affection in which he was held, thought the famous "Father Browns" third rate, was turned of by his oleaginous catholicism, and never gave him another thought.