As historian and novelist Balzac paints a picture of post Napoleonic France through the eyes of an impoverished family, and the trials of their lives. After a series of emotional hits, Balzac takes the reader through a contest of wits, set amidst a web of intrigue, and a very contorted family tree. The end result is an excellent story with a sophisticated plot which at times gives too accurate a portrait of the detachment of man. The Black Sheep also contains a short social commentary on New York, which though written 150 years ago, is still exceptionaly accurate.

Another occasion to live again an exceptionnal human adventure with Balzac.
A lot of emotion and intelligence ...

This is a simple, moral tale - one could almost describe it as a fable - concerned with the dangers of all-consuming avarice. Monsieur Grandet, his wife and their daughter Eugenie live in provincial Saumur. Grandet is a wealthy miser - so parsimonious that his house is falling down around him for want of repair, and even the family's food is rationed. The arrival of Grandet's nephew, the ambitious yet impecunious Charles, disturbs the household regime - Eugenie falls in love with him - and thereafter a tragedy unfolds.

I thought the novel almost read like a compressed Dickens: the characters are essentially two-dimensional, more illustrations of human faults and virtues than true to life. The book's brevity and (therefore) lack of meandering, coupled with a merciful omission of overdone bathos in its depiction of women, made its impact all the greater than having to plough through 1000 pages of Dickensian whimsy.

Balzac seemed concerned with the damage being done to human relationships by contemporary society's obsession with money. In "Eugenie Grandet", everything has its price - the characters only have worth in terms of their personal monetary wealth. It struck me that this has been a recurring theme in modern fiction - a questioning within capitalist societies of whether the material wealth that is produced by the economic system underpinning those societies is of itself a sufficiently fulfilling raison d'etre, or whether more is needed to meet human needs.

It is a delightful short tale of a pathetic story. Eugenie Grandet is not be the best novel from Balzac, but their characters are truly unforgetable. Reading this book would be a very satisfying experience. A Hint: Read it after Ursula Miruët; the stories are not connected, but a comparison of the heroines, and endings of both stories, worths the pain.

This is without a doubt one of my absolute favorites. I read La Pere Goriot before I read this one thinking it was great. After reading this I was convinced that Balzac was easily one of the best authors ever.

The story focuses around the members of the Grandet family. The Father is a miser the likes of which you have never seen, a cruel man willing to ruin his family in his pursuit of money and gold. He owns a wine field in the small town and within the first fifty pages he is already ripping the town off. Mme. Grandet is the poor wife who has become used to her husband's pettiness but seems unfulfilled. Eugenie, the daughter is a young girl who has lived a sheltered and restrained life in the enormous house, never realising what the outside world has to offer.

The story is really quite simple. Charles, Mr Grandet's nephew comes to visit the family (his father has killed himself but he doesn't know that until Mr. Grandet shows him the suicide letter.) Eugenie falls in love, the Parisienne fop and the two have a quick love affair, Charles goes away a and promises to return one day so that they may marry, and a lot more which I'm not so silly as to ruin for you.

The story is an extremely sad affair. Eugenie is so wonderfully written that you begin to feel sorry for her position and that she has never really seen true happiness. Overall, a touching book, well worth the read. Much better than many of the other classics out there, believe me.

Balzac is so underated.

A novella by Balzac, the story of the draper's daughter Augustine Guillaume and her marriage to the rich artist Théodore de Sommervieux. It's a romance, but not a conventional one. The two fall in love despite their social differences. Balzac sees this as the fatal flaw in their relationship - their different unbringings, interests and temperaments gnaw away at the marriage.

It seemed to me that there was a social conservatism running through the story, with Balzac saying essentially that morgantic marriages are built on sand. An interesting, short and early work.

G Rodgers

In this fairly early Balzac novel, part of his grand "La Comedie humaine" project (in which he set out to describe every aspect of French society with interwoven plots), Raphael, a young and destitute nobleman, acquires a talisman with particular powers. This patch of chagreen skin, its Arabic inscription promising to fulfill his will, also grows smaller every time a wish is granted -- and with it, his lifespan. A struggle begins worthy of Stephen King horror. Raphael must either somehow stop the talisman's shrinking or try to bring his will to a screeching halt. Mixed in is the story of a beautiful but heartless woman he desires. (This part, to be honest, gets a bit dull at times, though it is somewhat crucial to Raphael's psychological portrait.) This wasted venture prevents him from being closer to the simpler but caring girl who deserves his love. Balzac's father believed that the human will ultimately saps a person of his life if overexerted. In this short novel, Balzac explores this idea with flair and wit, and maybe a bit too much on-the-couch psychoanalysis.

...Cesar Birotteau is pretty damned boring. It has its moments, but really, Balzac is at his best when his wild, fantastical impulses are let loose, fascinatingly at odds with his view of himself as historian. This is a very restrained novel, with little or none of the former aspect of his character. And it just ain't that interesting. The painstaking attention to detail may be laudable, and the title character's rise and fall is entirely believable, but there's very little real drama. The previous reviewer compared du Tillet do Vautrin, which is patently ridiculous: du Tillet is an unpleasant character to be sure, but he never ascends the heights of terrible grandeur that Vautrin does, nor was Balzac trying to make him do so.

I can't give this less than three stars: it's well-written, and, as always, Balzac has a fine grasp of financial institutions. Unsurprisingly, that does not exactly make for the most riveting of reads, however. Ultimately, Cesar Birotteau is somewhat valuable for giving us early glimpses of characters like Crevel, Popinot, and Gaudissart, but it's definitely not for the uninitiated.

This is the fifth Balzac book I have read, and it is the fourth best of all of them. This may be a great compliment to Balzac's writing abilities since he seems to be able to dispense classic after classic.

This story, is a simple tale about the rise and fall of a perfumer. Cesar, the perfumer, lives in Paris and is having a fairly good life thanks to the invention of a hand cream. Unfortunately, since he is not a clever business man, Cesar falls into debt when he throws an elegant society ball. The rest of the book deals with his dowfall as Cesar deals with his wife and daughters sadness, a friend who ran off with 100000 francs, sleazy bankers, an angry nut dealer, architect and his future son in law.

Cesar Birroteau is a fairly tragic story which will have the ability to move the reader. Those who have read other Balzac works will recognize Gobseck the money letter and also the reference to the Nucignens from La Pere Goriot.

This is a great Balzac work with a notable ending. It is not as good as Eugenie Grandet, Ursule Mirouet or La Pere Goriot but is none the less excellent.

Some readers may find Balzac's attention to detail exhausting in several places. Especially in one or two chapters dealing with accounting, you may as well skip over them because they are virtually incomprehensible but also unnecessary.

Balzac's characters also seem similar if you have read other books. Cesar is similar to Goriot, Cesarine to Ursule Mirouet and Eugenie Grandet, the prodigy son in law (I forget his name) to Charles and Rastignac and finally the evil banker is similar to master criminal Vautrin.

Overall excellent. His charcters cry and fall to their knees a lot but that's no surprise if you've read other books of Balzac.

The opening of this book is one of the most sublime and lovely scenes in French literature. It is the description of an ascent up a Norwegian fjord by a girl and an other-worldy being,and, as Gautier said, "He has used no colors but the pure blue of the sky, the white of the snow, and a few pearly tints for the shadows."

The rest of the book involves long didactic sermons, but as the sermons pertain to Swedenborgian theology, they are aestheitcally gratifying as well as instructive.

Amateurs may be confused by the character of Seraphita/Seraphitus, who continually fluctuates between both genders, and some may fail to see how this all relates to the Human Comedy, but I think most readers will be entirely capable of enjoying and comprehending this wonderful novel.

A short novel about the life of the gifted yet enigmatic character Louis Lambert, as recounted by an old schoolfriend. I understand that Balzac drew on many of his own childhood experiences in writing the novel.

It's a story of a poor, but gifted boy's struggles to find his own philosophy of life, as well as the difficulties he encoutered at school because of his very "differentness". Much of the novel examines Lambert's emerging analyses of contemporary philosophers, and his own emerging philosophy. As such, "Louis Lambert" is by no means action-packed and the pace is slow - it's a reflective novel.

Not to spoil the ending, but I think that Balzac came to the conclusion that fulfilment in life is as much an emotional as an intellectual pursuit.

Balzac's writing is a bit too descriptive for my tastes but this was a well written book. It portrays the biases of provincial life and the irony of the main character is quite an intriguin one though it does lead to a predicatble ending for him.

This was my first Balzac, and I was very disappointed. The story line was both thin and unconvincing, and I felt Balzac struggled in vain to make it interesting. Much of the novel was a brave attempt by the author to pad out the story to make up for the inadequacies of the plot. The introduction stated that Balzac was influenced by Sir Walter Scott - this explains a lot, as this novel belongs to the same sorry collection as Scott's worst.

This early novel is set in the civil war which followed the French Revolution, betweeen Republicanists and Royalists, called "chouans". These were guerrill-type bands sponsored by aristocrats, fighting to depose the new regime and reestablish the old one. In the plot, a Republican woman is sent to France to help with intelligence-gathering. But she falls in love with one of the chouan leaders. Another spy maneuvres to make her think her lover has betrayed her, and so she conspires against him. I don't share the other reviewers's opinion that it is a bad novel. It is just an average one by a great writer. I enjoyed it, though.

I am shocked at the negative reviews here. Sure, this is Balzac's first published novel and it may not have the elegant maturity of the many wonderful works he later wrote. But it gives us an exhiliarating heart-on-your-sleeve romanticism and a youthful audacity that makes it very special.

If you are going to read only one Balzac in your life, then maybe you wouldn't choose "The Chouans", but then I would wonder why you would ever choose to go through life and read only one Balzac.

I love the 19th century French novel...Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Flaubert. It may be somewhat of an acquired taste, but if you have the taste, "The Chouans" is a deserving member of the club.