Exploring Paris arm in arm with Balzac, nineteenth-century France’s most famous novelist and observerIn 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 mannersWithin 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 cafés, 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.
| Format |
Inbunden |
| Omfång |
208 sidor |
| Språk |
Engelska |
| Förlag |
Verso Books |
| Utgivningsdatum |
2024-06-25 |
| ISBN |
9781839767258 |
