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.

There is a Jean-Luc Godard segment in one of those compilation films so popular in Europe during the 1960s. Imagine a high class brothel of the future -- located, as I recall, at an airport. The client requests an assignation and draws a prostitute who all but rapes him. He tries to open a conversation with her, but she is all action and no talk. The client protests to the management and draws another one who dresses in frills like a character from Jane Austen and recites romantic poetry. You've probably already guessed what happens: This one is all talk and no action.

I yield to no one in my admiration of Balzac, whom I consider one of the greatest story-tellers of all time. It is very obvious that the character of Madame Blanche-Henriette de Mortsauf meant something special to the author in his life: Her piety and fine-tuned sensibility, however, don't come across well in our time. Women who suffer endlessly and fritter their lives away in sighs tend to give rise to a frustrated "Oh, come off it already!"

The opposite of Mme de Mortsauf is the fascinating Arabelle, Marchionesse of Dudley, who conquers the narrator, Felix de Vandenesse, and keeps him in thrall with "caresses never before enjoyed by any man." Alas, Balzac uses the multi-talented Arabelle primarily as a warning to all Frenchmen how cold-hearted the British are. We are tantalized but far from fulfilled.

Call me a dirty old man, if you will, but I would rather that Balzac and Felix spent more time with Dudley and a whole lot less with Mme de Mortsauf. As it is, the latter dies horribly of her excessive sensibility, and Felix walks away from her grave resolved to live a life of which the angelic Mme de Mortsauf would have approved.

We all know that Balzac made no such resolution in his own life. Despite his monkish pretensions, the author spent all his life pursuing women. When, after a multi-year courtship, he finally snared his Countess, he died within a year.

It sounds as if I did not like LILY OF THE VALLEY. Far from it, I liked it a great deal; but do not see it as one of the author's more successful works. And yet, even at his worst, Balzac is better than most writers at their best, as when Felix muses "I loved an angel and a demon, equally beautiful, one of them adorned with all the virtues which hatred of our imperfections induces us to hurt; the other with all the vices which our selfishness prompts us to deify." Read it and judge for yourself.

Balzac spent 16 years to write this book -trought 1828 to 1844 and it's divided in 6 parts. The first 3 goes to the middle of the tale and the narrative is deep and focused on the france social life trought the beginning of the XIX century.

Balzac shows in those firsts chapters a lot of questions about society and moralism, showing a good view trought humanism and the cruel place of a woman on society at that time. Altought the reader get inside trought the life of Julie, her bad marriage and her deisires for love, the narrator is always telling us the problems surrounding the emancipation of a woman. "The purity of a woman is not compatible with society's obligations and freedom. To emancipate women means corrupt them". It sounds like Balzac agree with the terms of society.

In the last 3 chapters the narrative get more dinamic and more superficial. Like a "blue library" tale. Those romantic -like a sugar cam- tale. So Balzac broke the rhithm of narrative. It really appears like a mistake. Another mistakes are the change of narrator focus - from 3th to 1th- on the 4th chapter, and the last mistake is some problems with time rhithm: in one page the history is on 1920, for example, and 20 or 30 pages after, passed 4 years on the narrative it starts like "it was summer 1921"...

Would Balzac made those mistakes? Or would it be on purpose? The author made a lot of questions trought society's frivolity and humanism. Those mistakes wouldn't be a way of showing critizing over morality trought society? These are some question that I have in mind... Would be Balzac superficial, ignoring those mistakes? Or would it be an ironic and slight way of showing his questions trought society?

A very familiar moral tale, in which Raphael, disappointed in his unsuccessful attempts to woo the rich Faedora (underlying theme perhaps - is she a lesbian??) enters into a Faustian pact, the "talisman" of which is the strange and exotic wild ass's skin. The consequences are of course, disasterous for Raphael and those with whom he comes into contact.

The messages are unsurprising - wealth without responsibility and/or the maturity to use it wisely is a curse both on the wealthy and on others. It's difficult to feel any sympathy for the hero (or is he an anti-hero?) Raphael: his love for Faedora is driven by her wealth and his poverty; and essentially he gets what he deserves.

The book I think suffers from the familiarity of its themes, and the hackneyed devices it uses - the skin is exotic as it has Arabic writing on it (everything from the East is mysterious, and curses of course are always powerful). The mood shifts of the book make it difficult to judge how Balzac indended it to be read - the first part is an eerie meeting leading to the possession of the skin, then a long section on the pursuit of Faedora, the last section being Raphael's decline beneath the effects of the skin (including a long satire on scientists, as they aim to analyse and neutralise the skin).

In all, not a bad book, but it suffers from the author's lack of a consistent approach the the story, and it contains nothing to surprise the modern reader.

Certainly not Balzac's finest, but still compelling in its own way. The thing ya gotta understand firstly is that this is one of the man's self-consciously 'philosophical' novels, meaning that drawing realistic and complex character portraits is not a primary concern. It's certainly possible to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Raphael, but he's not really much of a 'character,' and if this was one's first encounter with Balzac, one might get the false impression that he just wasn't able to draw deep characters. Anyway: this is, if I recall, only the second novel of the Human Comedy, and in many ways the ideas presented form the basis for his later works. The idea of success without any real work--success which turns out to be fleeting and ephermeral--is a common Balzacian theme, but here it's taken in a literal sense: Raphael acheives success not through his own merits but rather through the magical powers of the skin in question, even as this continued 'success' gradually diminishes his life-force. Compare this with Lucien in Lost Illusions, who rises and falls in much the same manner, only without any sort of physical representation of this rise and fall.

Bleh. The real question is, is the book a good read? Yeah, more or less. It definitely gets better as it goes along; one's patience is definitely tried by the antique shop sequence near the beginning, and I found the banquet/orgy scene to be more than a little tedious. However! Things do pick up: Raphael's courtship of Faedora is well done, and the novel's climax is wonderfully bizarre and nightmarish (I swear, it made me think of Lovecraft). The reader's patience is rewarded; it just takes a little while. As previously noted, not a good first Balzac (try Old Goriot), but once you're hooked, a worthwhile piece of work that provides priceless insights into the author's mode of thinking.

This is bo no means the man's best book. I have read 4 of his other works and this is the worst yet it is still an excellent book.

The plot focuses around Raphael, a depressed man who acquires a talisman that will grant your wishes. The catch is everytime you make a wish, the talisman diminishes, as does your health. The book is divided up almost into three seperate parts. The first deals with Raphael going to an elegant diner with colleagues followed by an orgy. The second part is cloddish and long as it discusse Raphael's romance towards Foedora. She is a sly temptress who really comes across as an uncompelling ice queen. Why Raphael would go after her is beyond me.

The third part features the books most touching moments and also its most wonderful imagery. This is where Raphael flees to the country and ponders his existence.

Overall a good book, worth reading and all of that. If you are considering Blazac read Eugenie Grandet and Ursule Mirouet first. Then read La Pere Goriot and Cesar Birrotteau. They are all far more compelling books.

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.

At the risk of giving away all of the plot of this novel yet again (see the rest of the reviews section), the book is written as the confession of Felix de Vandenesse. Felix recounts his love for the married Madame de Mortsauf, and how his infatuation with the English Lady Dudley destroys the former.

It's essentially a tragedy, but with no new themes for those who've read their Stendahl and Flaubert: love and death; young beau's obsession with an attractive older married woman; a woman trapped in a disasterous marriage; the social norms and legal framework of the day working to disempower women (also, compare with the Brontes); and so on.

Perhaps one could defend Balzac to a certain extent as he was writing before most of those other authors, but still the familiarity of the issues raised in the novel meant that I needed something to make it stand out. That I'm afraid, I didn't get. I found it heavy going in places - it's frequently too melodramatic, but, more pertinently, Balzac's writing becomes becalmed for large sections of the novel. Descriptions seem to go on for ever, as do some of the characters' speeches. As I'm reading more of Balzac I'm finding that he's sometimes prone to that fault (see "Le Medecin de Campagne"), and it marrs this novel, making it lose pace.

I was surprised that Balzac regarded "The Lily of the Valley" as one of his best works. I think he did far better than this.

Of all of Balzac's 93 odd novels this one was his personal favorite. This is the sixth book of his I've read and I think it's probably one of the worst. That's not saying it's bad, it just doesn't compare to the brilliance of Eugenie Grandet, Ursule Mirouet, Pere Goriot or Cesar Birroteau.

The plot centers around Felix, a young man who has had a difficult time growing up. One night at a prestigious ball he falls in love with Madame de Morstauf or Henriette. He then goes up to her house in Toraine in a beautiful valley and spends great lengths of time with her.

Her husband is a tyrannical type of guy, prone to violent fits but Henriette is determined to stick with the marriage. Felix and her develop an odd kind of relationship, almost like brother and sister. Felix then falls in love with an Englishwoman realizing he has no chance with Henriette. Henriette dies of jealousy.

That is a very sketchy plot outline.

The book is too long and a bit boring for Balzac. His lead male charcters are always variations on the same thing and he spends far too much time dealing with atmosphere and surroundings.

As usual Balzac uses words like "ardent", "ardour" and several others far too much and in each of his novels I've noticed that all of his characters mention at one point that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their lovers. Of course they never do.

There are many wonderful parts to this book, especially a cutting letter describing the differences between French and English women.

A very good book, but for Balzac, my favorite, this is one of the weaker ones.

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.

I wasn't quite able to get the full meaning of what the painter Frenhofer was trying to paint, but I can guess it was beautiful, and yet it turned out wrong. I guess I read too fast. Balzac was accurate in his names, though, with Pourbus, Mabuse, and Nicolas Poussin..................

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.

Genestas, an army officer, travels to a remote, mountainous part of France in search of doctor Benassis. Upon his arrival, he learns (from the good doctor himself) of the transformation of the region by Benassis, and eventually of Benassis's past.

I thought that this was a lumbering, uneven novel. Much of it is taken up with very long monologues by the main characters - Benassis in particular. The reader is presented with a utopian vision of a society shaped by one man's ideas (admittedly assisted by his devotees). It could be a recipe for market-oriented reform, taking what was essentially a backward, pre-industrial society and connecting it to the world by means of modern agriculture, commerce and effective transport links. Apparently there were biological benefits too - Benassis identified that the region's isolation was the very reason why so many "crétins" tended to be born there.

The problem was that this recipe was not enough to underpin society - direction of the masses from above to inculcate "sound views", and religious belief as the key stone were vital. I detected a tension within the book - although much space is given to utopian philosophy, much is also devoted to the "gloire" of the (recent then) Napoleonic past, perhaps revealing a tension within France of the time between imperial/militaristic and liberal views.

Much of this felt like Balzac using the novel to express his own views, and as such the novel lacked pace and interest - the expositions seemed endless. Balzac managed to provide a glimmer of plot development later on with Genestas's and Benassis's confessions of their past, wherein is found the usual nineteenth century pathos, and there was even a little humour (helpfully pointed out in my edition by Pierre Barbéris's notes) regarding "les mauvais habitudes" of the boy Adrien Genestas.

But in all, an endurance test to read.