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Balzac's Lives

Balzac's Lives

by Peter Brooks

New York Review Books ·2020 ·280 pages ·Criticism
Bottom of the Pile
Bottom of the Pile
I Index
16/99
Bottom of the Pile

2/99

Critics

Maybe Someday

30/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

2/99

Rating

3/99

Volume

57/99

Rating

3/99

Volume

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About This Book

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac with this groundbreaking biography that illuminates the writer's life and era through close study of his expansive and inimitable works. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh--entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes--that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.


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Reviews

"As Brooks knows well, we read fiction to know the world, not the author."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

"Unfortunately, Brooks gets so caught up in recounting Balzac's creations that the writer himself gets lost ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

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