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Lois's Reviews > The Human Comedy: Selected Stories
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
by
by
An interesting, varied and sometimes surprising collection of shorter stories from a writer who is often considered the greatest novelist of all time. There were some good plots and elegant prose in here—that is, if you can stomach all the lengthy philosophising, royalist political diatribes, and overbearing misogyny (seriously, yuck). This was sometimes difficult, particularly in the longer stories, like the last one (the introduction wasn't wrong in suggesting that Balzac is better when he reigns himself in). The only ones I can really say I liked were 'Sarrasine' (just so delightfully surprising) and 'The Red Inn' (which had sort of a gothic-romance feel about it). I don't feel compelled to read any more by him, however.
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Reading Progress
October 17, 2013
– Shelved as:
to-read
October 17, 2013
– Shelved
February 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
book-clubs
February 15, 2014
–
Started Reading
February 16, 2014
–
7.0%
""There was something grand and despotic in this old Homer, who harboured within himself an Odyssey consigned to oblivion.""
February 17, 2014
–
16.0%
""... one always ends up pulling the petals from daisies, even in a drawing room, without a daisy in sight ...""
February 18, 2014
–
20.0%
"If "Another Study of Womankind" had consisted solely of the last story, of the Spaniard in Vendôme, I would have liked it a thousand times better. Creepy! The rest was just moralising that was creepy in an entirely different way ..."
February 25, 2014
–
53.0%
"Just finished "Z. Marcas", and honestly I found it an interminable bout of whinging (weirdly reminiscent of a lot of the stuff my generation writes on the web today). Also, it had this line in it: "A woman snuffs out all activity, all ambition. Napoleon reduced woman to what she ought to be; on that point he was great." Which - yuck. Just yuck."
March 1, 2014
–
70.0%
""Equality may be a right, but no power on earth is capable of converting it into a fact." I think this quote highlights a key difference between the thinking of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth."
March 9, 2014
–
Finished Reading
