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Balzac's Lives

Balzac's Lives

by Peter Brooks

New York Review Books ·2020 ·280 pages
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
34/99
Bottom of the Pile

4/99

Critics' Rating Index

Near the Top

64/99

Readers' Rating Index

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Scholars' Citation Index

3/99

Volume of Reviews

6/99

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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.


Reviews

"Brooks reminds us that Balzac's vast imagined social world derived from his being able to write down all that was in his head."

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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