>literally the greatest and most influential novelist of all time>almost completely forgotten in the 21st centuryHow did this happen? What could possibly account for it?
>>24094996Im surprised people who really dickride his work like Dostoevsky and Proust are more famous than him
>>24094996>ball sack>dumb ass>flaw BertSrsly frogs... You can't make shit like this up.
I hope to read more of him once my French skills improveLe Colonel Chabert was my favourite novella of 2024 but it was exhausting at the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS-9nTMidqYt. nationaliste for a country I've never been to nor met a person from before
>>24094996I like his statue
Are the Pleiade editions of his any good or are they mostly just intros + bibliographies with minimal notes?
>>24094996Naturalism is a meme and makes for boring reading.
>>24094996People don't like fatty.
He disgusted millions of frogs from literature with his boring novels that never end. After being forced to read Le Père Goriot in highschool I didn't touch a book for a decade.
>>24095029Cool. What exactly does that have to do with Balzac? It's obvious you haven't read him if you believe he's a naturalist. Unless you're conflating realism and naturalism, which is a common misconception that betrays a lack of literary experience.Balzac's works are anything but "naturalistic" or "boring". They often carry a Romantic and melodramatic flair; his stories focus on extreme emotions, larger-than-life characters, and dramatic moral struggles, all of which contrasts with the detached tone of naturalism. Some of his material even includes supernatural or mystical elements, such as Swedenborgian mysticism or theories of magnetism. This clearly sets him apart from the strictly materialistic worldview of naturalists, such as Zola. Balzac is a transitional figure between Romanticism and realism who blends the imaginative with the observational. That oversimplified label simply doesn't apply to his body of work.
>>24094996Pronouncing his name is uncool >"hi there anon chan! What book is that?"<"this is father goriot from the same author of cousin bette">"oh is that so? I never heard those title in my tik tok and youtube short, what's the author name?"<*start to sweating nervously* "I-i gotta go, s..see you later"
>>24094996Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes.
>>24095130Vlady said this out of pure, childlike envy. He only managed to write 1 truly great novel, whereas Balzac wrote like 70.
>>24095132He likes plenty of other novelists though?
>>24094996The human comedy is an impressive achievement but what I read of it is also boring as sin. Zola mogs
>>24095059Bit him alone proves that even fat people can make good literature and art
>>24095220What did you read?
>>24095230pere goriot and therese raquin. I got a copy of lost illusion I plan to get through some time this year but if that doesn't click that's it for me, I'll just stick to the better author he influenced
>>24095247Lost Illusions is good, but it's the first volume of a 2-parter. You'll have to read Splendours and Miseries of a Courtesan as well if you want resolution
>>24094996still a staple in francophone education and if you ever took a French lit class in uni, expect the zac.
>>24095247Why did you find Goriot boring? Did you not find the betrayal of the old man's daughters tragic, almost Shakespearean? Was Vautrin not an interesting, enigmatic character who speaks some truths with regard to life, no matter how vile it sounds? Regardless, Lost Illusions is his best work.
>>24095338>resolutionoh you plotfags. you are hard to love, but also hard to hateanyway if it's good I will naturally want to keep reading, and if it's not there would be no reason to keep going just to know how the story endsI've heard it's good, but I have no expectations that he will suddenly lose the flurry of dry descriptions of furniture and appearance of characters, or become less clumsy and mechanicistic in his portrayal of emotions
>>24095347I admire the ambition of the human comedy and his sociological aims, but much like Buffon's work makes for a lousy natural history, the parts where his novels shine the most are not when trying to depict french society but rather when he deals with grotesquely exhagerrated human types. It is fun and interesting when Buffon's stumbles his way through describing a crocodile accompained by a hilariously imprecise drawing made by someone who has never actually seen a crocodile. It's boring when he writes about the cat we are all familiar with. Swap the crocodile for the dramatic and exhagerrated and cartoonish Vautrin and the cat with the tired archetype of the father martyrized by his daughters and that's how I feel about Balzac's works>shakespeareanplease
>>24095347NtaGoiriot's one of his most threadbare novels whereas TR's among Zola's best, although Germinal and Nana fags will probably disagree, as well as that one odd duck who worships La Terre
>>24095366for me, it's la bete humaine
>>24095366And what about L'assommoir chads?
>>24095361>>shakespearean>pleaseI mentioned that only because it's clearly borrowing from King Lear. A little tongue-in-cheek.
>>24095354Plot's an important aspect, dickhead, even in otherwise 'plotless' novels soi-disants. Proust's tying up loose ends and waxing philosophically aesthetic in the ultimate volume of Lost Time is why it's at least the second best of the seven, for instance. Not every novel can be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which, if it fails to evoke one's OWN childhood, fails entirely (meta plot)
>>24095381Yeah, it's good too. Tbh I like both Balzac and Zola.
>>24095377Based completionist
>>24095390>the ultimate volume of Lost Time is why it's at least the second best of the sevengee anon how pleb can you be please stop humiliating yourself like that
>>24095407Kek, wait a minute. Read Human Comedy, whereas you meant the novel about the train conductor/maniac. Yeah, that one's fun. As is The Belly of Paris.
>>24095408Pose an argument and be owned, kek
>>24095381honestly made me stop drinking. pathos is a cheat code.
>>24094996Crazy hyperbole, OP, but he was very good, no doubt.
>>24095418first of all, it goes 2>4>1>7>3>5>6with that out of the way, what's good about volume 7 is not the tying up of loose ends. in fact the last three volumes are a mess of half baked ideas for how to close off characters with some even dying and coming back to life since he couldn't proofread them. the "triumph of death" at the very end of the novel is neat and all, but most definitely not because the plot is resolved, rather because the narrator's aesthetic revelation is realised, and even then his musing in that part aren't any more grand or insightful or interesting than other parts of the novel like the intermittence of the heart in volume 4 for instancevolume 7 is also arguably one of the most plot heavy volumes of the recherche with the war torn paris of the first half and saint loup dying and all that jazz, and that first half is absolutely dreadful and one of the low points of the whole thing
>>24094996believe me or not. i once thought of writing my own "Père Goriot" until one literary friend of my interrupted me and said "ah,it seems you got inspired from balzac,good good". this killed me and that's how i came to know about me.
>>24095459came to know about him*
>>24095004>Dostoevsky is now considered better than BalzacWe decayed as a civilization.
>>24095433>2>4Based
>>24095020>29504 pages, densely packedThey're autism as usual.
>>24094996balzac's great. grand, creaking 19th century soap operas. recommend any anons read him if you haven't already. can recommend the NYRB edition of his stories + Lost Illusions
>>240951025/5 post nigga
>>24096357I think Cousin Bette is his best after Lost Illusions. Would recommend it to anyone. It's absolutely tragicomic in the end, especially given how exaggerated and irredeemable the characters are.
>>24095102>a Romantic and melodramatic flair; his stories focus on extreme emotions, larger-than-life characters, and dramatic moral strugglesThis is actually so tedious and soap compared to stuff like Chekhov but Balzac does have talent to shine a light on every element of society
>>24096357>19th century soap operasWAOW!
>>24096431Calling them soap operas is a disservice. They're obviously very good works with many aesthetic and literary qualities. They said, they can be melodramatic and exaggerated.
>>24096444>TheyThat*
>>24095429good man
>>24095429The scene towards the end with Coupeau having delirium tremens absolutely fucked me up.
