Balzac's Paris - The City As Human Comedy

In Balzac's vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail - the cafes, landmarks, avenues, parks - and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. 'To saunter is a science,' he writes, 'it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.' Eric Hazan follows in Balzac's footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist's outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac's photographic memory.More than a tour of the city, Balzac's Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.

Product details

• Authors: Eric Hazan, Eric (Director) Hazan
• Publisher: Verso
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.06.2024
• EAN: 9781839767258
• ISBN: 978-1-83976-725-8
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 150 mm x 220 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, France, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, Paris (City), Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Human Geography, Settlement, urban and rural geography, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form