The NYRB collection of Balzac stories - a useful book

A brief repetition of my antique advice about Honoré  de Balzac:

Père Goriot (1835) is the centerpiece of Balzac’s conception of a gigantic, interlinked web of fiction, so I’ll take for granted that you ought to read that one.  It’s the entryway to Lost Illusions (1837-43) and A Harlot High and Low (1838-47), Balzac’s grand opera.  Many shorter works hook onto these.  Plus it is arguably Balzac’s single best novel, all on its own.

I give that honor to Eugénie Grandet (1833), more perfect in structure and detail, what I and a later French tradition think of as artful.  Balzac is rarely interested in perfect.

The vengeful Cousin Bette (1846) and the cheery Ursule Mirouët (1841) are also good slabs of Balzac.

Much of the best or most Balzacish Balzac is in his shorter fiction.  Some of it is essential to understanding pieces of the gigantic Human Comedy apparatus – plot, characters, metaphysics – and some of it is as good as anything Balzac wrote.

The most recent English-language collection, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (2014) from NYRB Classics is a most helpful book.  The translations are all new, from several translators.  Highlights:

“A Passion in the Desert” (1830), Balzac’s best story.

“The Red Inn” (1831) and “Gobseck” (1830), nearly necessary appendices to Père Goriot.  I mean, there is a chunk of the novel that makes no sense without “Gobseck,” a downside of making everything connected.  The Human Comedy is like DC Comics – it has “continuity” with the accompanying pleasures and aggravations.

“The Red Inn” is available in an older Penguin Classics collection, also useful, but to my knowledge “Gobseck” had not been translated for a hundred years.  Baffling.

Then there is “Sarrasine” (1831), perhaps Balzac’s most-read story since it became the foundation-text for S/Z (1970), a work of structuralist theory by Roland Barthes.  How many graduate students have read this bit of Balzac and nothing else.  It is good to have “Sarrasine” restored to its place among the other stories.

A third of the NYRB collection is a single work, the novella “The Duchess de Langeais” (1834), a risky move since some of it is pretty dull.  Other parts, though, show where Alexander Dumas learned how to write adventure novels.

With this book, I have read 39 pieces of the 91 or 93 or 97 parts of The Human Comedy,  not quite 5,000 pages. Ten novels and twenty-nine shorter things.  It is important to read the shorter pieces in order to run up the count.

Tomorrow I will try to write something about the stories themselves, a bit of a “best of” post, but just as a consumer guide: this book was long overdue.  It fills a gap in a way NYRB’s earlier Balzac volume, The Unknown Masterpiece, did not, although anyone interested in art would not want to miss that title story.  Only two stories overlap with the Penguin Selected Short Stories, which is of comparable quality, but omits “A Passion in the Desert.”  Neither collection includes “The Firm of Nucingen,” another Père Goriot adjunct.  Someone should publish a book titled  Père Goriot Plus, with the novel plus all of the related short fiction.  NYRB Classics should publish a third volume of Balzac stories.