Balzac's Paris - The City As Human Comedy
Author(s): Eric Hazan
In Balzac's vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.
To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail - the caf�s, landmarks, avenues, parks - and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.
Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. 'To saunter is a science,' he writes, 'it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.' Eric Hazan follows in Balzac's footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist's outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac's photographic memory.
More than a tour of the city, Balzac's Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Verso Books
- : Verso
- : 0.300278
- : 25 June 2024
- : .71 Inches X 5.79 Inches X 8.56 Inches
- : books
Special Fields
- : Eric Hazan
- : Hardback
- : English
- : 843.7
- : 208