Cousin Bette: Part One of 'Poor Relations' - Softcover

Balzac, Honoré De

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140268219 ISBN 13: 9780140268218

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

Cousin Bette (1847) vividly brings to life the rift between the old world and the new and is, among other things, a serious study of the Paris demimonde. Compelled to live in the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives, the Hulot family, Cousin Bette's energies are directed wholly towards their destruction. The bitter conflict which ensues embodies the struggle for survival of the old values against the rising tide of the new. In its brutal confrontation with human nature and in its technical virtuosity, Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself.

About this title

Review:

Raine's translations restore Balzac to his passionate and efficient outrage upon the expectations of fiction. This best of his novels is worthy to be 'ours'--and now it is --Richard Howard

The novel exemplifies what Henry James described as Balzac s huge, all-compassing, all-desiring, all-devouring love of reality --V. S. Pritchett

About the Author:

The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140268219
• ISBN 13: 9780140268218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448