Taylor Lee's Reviews > The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

There comes a time when literature finds so indelibly marked the grooves of its path by a social moment that the conflation of the one—social turbulence—with the other—ink saturated composition—can be forgiven. We writing the literature of our own lives must read back through letters of former moments in grand curiosity: where the cessation of reality? Where the entrance beginning of fabulation?

Perhaps more keenly the work than of any other writer mine eyes over which have passed Balzac, in this manner, is master. For who else invites the world onto the page and a reader inside its midst to deeply mingle? La vie est Balzac et Balzac, la vie. The writer has made life writing or, perhaps, writing, life. In Balzac through every vein of language life’s vigor, passion, and zest tinted course. One may not claim fulness of life until Balzac the fevered force has, tasted, been absorbed.