Old Goriot (Pere Goriot) - Softcover

De Balzac, Honore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420931903 ISBN 13: 9781420931907

Publisher: Digireads.com, 2009

Synopsis

Considered to be one of Balzac's most important works, "Old Goriot", or "Père Goriot", is the story of its title character Goriot; a mysterious criminal-in-hiding named Vautrin; and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac. We are introduced to the characters at Maison Vauquer, a boarding house owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. Central to the theme of the book is the struggle to achieve upper-class status in society. Rastignac is eager to achieve this upper-class standing but is unfamiliar to the ways of Parisian society. Vautrin tries to convince Rastignac to pursue an unmarried woman named Victorine, a dubious suggestion which involves the disposal of her brother who blocks the woman's fortune. The failings to achieve this upper-class status are exemplified by Goriot who has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters, yet they reject him. A classic and tragic story, "Old Goriot" is one of the most pivotal works in Balzac's sweeping novel sequence "La Comédie Humaine", which endeavors to depict the effects of society on the entirety of the human condition.

About this title

About the Author:

The son of a civil servant, Honore de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendome, 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 pere andfils, 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.

From the Back Cover:

Balzac's great theme was money, and he explored its uses and abuses with all the particularity of the masterful poet he was. Old Goriot, betrayed by rapacious daughters, and Rastignac, an ambitious provincial youth alive to his opportunities, form the twin foci around which the grasping Parisian society of the 1820s revolves, in this, his most economical and universally loved novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.com
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1420931903
• ISBN 13: 9781420931907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160