Père Goriot - Honoré de Balzac

Père Goriot (Balzac, 1834)

Twenty years before Flaubert, Balzac was already dishing out this depressingly modern novel, only without style or substance. The rich tradesman Goriot impoverishes himself to launch his daughters into high society, but his overindulgence leads to their indifference. Along the way, we get a coming-of-age story for Eugéne de Rastignac, a student who becomes corrupted by a desire for the same high society of Paris that ruins Goriot's daughters. We also get a random crime plot involving some sort of master criminal.

As I hinted before, Balzac's writing style leaves a lot to be desired. He waxes far too eloquent far too often. Goriot's dying speech rambles on for five overwrought pages, as does Vautrin's Machiavellian spiel about Parisian society. The first chapter, with its copious description of the boarding house where these characters live, provides the perfect one-sentence summary of Balzac's tiresome prose: "But any adequate description of how old, cracked, rotten, rickety, worm-eaten, one-handed, one-eyed, decrepit, and moribund is the furniture in the place, would only delay our narrative, and this the busy reader would never forgive." This after six pages, which apparently were not an "adequate description"...

The wordiness would be forgivable if Balzac told a great story, but it just isn't the case. Dickens gets away with his wordiness because his plots are masterful and his characters earn our emotional involvement. In Père Goriot, there is no one to love, no one to cheer.  Balzac does include some great scenes, though: genuine humor comes to life in a couple scenes at the boarding house dining room, and, after Goriot finally stops talking and dies, his funeral is actually one of the most pitiable scenes in literature.

Apparently, a lot of characters in this book either occurred in earlier works by Balzac or recur in later works. In this book, he decided he would start linking his works together through recurring characters to form a series of novels and short stories, pretentiously titled The Human Comedy, which intended to portray everything - yes, everything - in human experience. There are some genuinely successful moments in Père Goriot, but if this is his best, I think I can skip the rest.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 unforgiving readers