Jan 23, 2020

Balzac's Père Goriot

Written in early 19th century, the book is one of the most widely-read translated Balzac novels, depicts the France and society of early to mid-1800s – alien from the one I live in, operating with very different moral compass and social mores. Strange land early France. Stranger were its social codes.

One reads Balzac for perhaps the world he creates for you. Reading his opening description of the Pension, one can almost see, smell and feel what he shows you. Fast paced, short novel, but so rich in detail and drama that you live in that parallel universe for the hours you spend with him. No matter what the moral and social contradictions it plays in your head and all the inexplicable observations you end up piling your thoughts with.

The novel is set in a boarding house in Paris, where there's Pere Goriot, a retiree who seems to have happily married off his daughters and given them his fortune and now lives frugally, and there’s Rastingac, a law student, fresh from the provinces, full of high ambition but the ways of making your way to the top in France of those times are less through hard work (as the modern, free society wants you to implicitly believe), but as everyone in those times seem to understand, explicitly in who knows who and who bestows favour on whom. The construct of marriages is more like economic and social partnerships, and almost everyone is crafty (all women, men), laying out schemes to get what they want. And layer on that a father who believes the only way to live is to keep pampering the grown-up, married daughters to the extent that after he has given all his fortune to them, he takes out his remaining annuity principal to fund a party dress (!) leaving him with nothing to live on or to give any more which brings its own heart-breaking realizations.

It all is intriguing, and for lack of a better word, strange. Every character is flawed, and not really true to themselves, inconsistent through the temporal dimension of the novel – like real people, as if the author is also getting to know them with you and not really knows them already. And perhaps that’s what it is – a reflection on the society of those times, penned so close to reality that it reads like satire. You do feel like following up on the characters and for that we have the whole of Balzac universe, over 90 novels he wrote in this ‘Human Comedy’ series. Before Zola peopled the streets of Paris with his characters, it was Balzac.

I enjoyed the read and the contradictory firing up of thoughts. It addresses some innate curiosity - this contemplation of worldviews of people of a different place and time - it satiates some and then adds more questions. And Balzac seems like a big mine to explore those questions.

Long long ago, I read a collection of his stories, and this was the first novel. The edition I read from is Norton’s Critical Edition, translated by Burton Raffel and comes pack full of responses on Balzac from Emile Zola to Proust to Henry James to modern times too (I hope to read through some of them). For the time being, perhaps that’ll be all of Balzac for me, but I do know now whom to read if I need a total capture of senses. So easily takes you away from the realities of your own day and time, both public and private.


PS: A few weeks later. Thinking about Balzac's world, and other fictional worlds of a time and place removed from ours. All worlds different from ours seem absurd and unreal. To the people living in those worlds, the world is what it is, and everything makes great sense. But someone looking at them from somewhere else, a wonder arises, things don't make sense, and a 100 questions crop up. And you need to suspend that disbelief to swim in those waters. That way of existing seeming the real and the only way to be for the people inside. But seen from a different vantage point, things don't line up the way they do inside, like the sphere for the square.

I guess, so it goes for our world too.

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Jan 16, 2020

Wrapping up 2019


Here’s the list of books I read in 2019 (most recent at top) 
A shorter list compared to the other two recent years. Not many. However, for a while, I did write about the books I read. Glad about that. For the most recently read ones (the 5 or 6 not-linked bullets), my notes are still in draft-form. Not a lot, but hopefully I’ll get around to cleaning the drafts – and then perhaps I might still have a para for each of those not-linked bullets, if not a post. 

2019 also marked the decade for this blog. I started this when I got my first kindle, when they launched global shipping, in 2009. I was still in my 20s and A was still a baby/ toddler then, almost. We were still in Mumbai then.  I’ve still got that first kindle somewhere – a bit dislodged from its original book-flap cover, although it never seems to go beyond the frozen screensaver image.  There’s a blacker, newer kindle now which too gathers dust since I gravitate towards books in their physical form. 


Compared to all the other blogs I have launched and closed meanwhile, this one has been here for a while, so cheers to that and to the decade of ‘the kindled and the unkindled’.

Not that these markers matter much but new years, new months, new weeks, they all bring a fleeting lift – a re-imagining of self, a refresh of resolutions, a renewed sense of possibilities. 

Here's to 2020, and to reading.

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