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Pere Goriot (La Comédie Humaine)

by Honoré de Balzac

3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 · rating details · 13,933 ratings · 483 reviews

« J'ai trouvé une idée merveilleuse. Je serai un homme de génie », s'exclame Balzac au moment où il écrit Le Père Goriot. Il venait d'imaginer La Comédie humaine, ce cycle romanesque dans lequel les mêmes personnages réapparaissent d'un roman à l'autre. Il venait de créer un monde, le monde balzacien.
Les plus beaux romans, dit André Maurois, sont des romans d'apprentissage...more

Paperback, 284 pages

Published August 1st 1962 by Signet Classics (first published 1834)

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Mar 13, 2011 brian rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

many pre-20th century novels have the nasty habit of presenting their author's beliefs as hard, solid fact. y'know what i mean: sentences which flatly state that 'Women believe' such and such or, as per balzac (pg. 51), "Young men's eyes take everything in; their spirits react to..." (<-- to which i'd argue: no! young men's eyes don't take in shit. and if i was gonna write either/or i'd find some elegant means to qualify it). now, wishy-washy apologetic sentences deserve destruction by sharpi...more many pre-20th century novels have the nasty habit of presenting their author's beliefs as hard, solid fact. y'know what i mean: sentences which flatly state that 'Women believe' such and such or, as per balzac (pg. 51), "Young men's eyes take everything in; their spirits react to..." (<-- to which i'd argue: no! young men's eyes don't take in shit. and if i was gonna write either/or i'd find some elegant means to qualify it). now, wishy-washy apologetic sentences deserve destruction by sharpie and a knuckle-punch to their author's neck, of course, but those simple, declarative sentences which aim to embody an entire gender or race or people or pathology are almost equally as frustrating. i suppose the confused haze which 20th century modernism and pomo dropped on everything blew all that 'belief = fact' stuff outta the water. once einstein laid it down that the part of the world we see and experience is not only a sliver but vastly different from actual physical reality, when picasso duchamp & warhol redefined art and our relation to the visual world, when freud reconfigured all we did and thought and believed as part of a long and complex causal chain, with marx's (amongst other's) reinterpretation of history, and so on and on... there was little room left for those epic all-encompassing statements. so there's a never-to-be-returned-to place occupied by the great brains of the past few centuries that is now taken up by novelists and creators either skirting the issue altogether or working to make sense of the confusion.

so pere goriot. a kind of cross b/t king lear and the giving tree: a kind-hearted old coot gives and gives and gives to some seriously awful daughters until he's flat broke and the aforementioned awfuls are just too busy to make a deathbed drop-by. a well told tale, genuinely felt, if, at times, the machinery was a bit visible, a few too many glimpses of the man behind the curtain... but overall my first balzac was a positive experience. wanna check out cousin bette and colonel chabert.

worth noting that within pere goriot there's a great spin-off crime novel waiting to be written. vautrin*, the most entertaining character in the book, is revealed as the notorious criminal nicknamed 'The Death-Dodger' who's part of a gang called The Ten Thousand -- b/c they have ten thousand partner thieves or b/c they'll only heist jobs bigger than ten thousand francs? i get fantomas fever just thinking about a vast network of thieves stalking the streets of paris. sign me up, frère, i'm in.

* here goes some of vautrin's dialogue:

"You see, I have an idea. My idea is to go off and live like a patriarch in the middle of some big estate, a hundred thousand acres for example, in the United States, in the South. I want to become a planter out there, own slaves, earn a cool few million from the sale of my cattle, tobacco, and timber, living like a king, doing whatever I want, leading the sort of life you can't imagine here, where people hide away in burrows made of plaster. I am a great poet. My poetry is not something I write down, it is composed of action and emotions. At this moment I possess fifty thousand francs, which would hardly buy me forty niggers. I need two hundred thousand, because I want two hundred niggers to satisfy my taste for the patriarchal life. Niggers, do you see? They are children, but fully grown, and you can do what you like with them without some Public Prosecutor coming along to ask you questions."(less)

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Sep 10, 2011 Matteo Di Maggio rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

È proprio grazie a papà Goriot che capisci il vero amore di un padre verso i propri figli! Un capolavoro ottocentesco e post rivoluzionario che marchia la vecchia società parigina come spietata e discriminante verso le persone più umili, come appunto il Goriot.
Il suo amore e la sua devozione rappresentano un grande esempio di umanità, di rispetto verso la famiglia.
Papà Goriot è veramente un capolavoro!

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Sep 16, 2011 Lee rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's good to study up on the history of the novel -- this one's apparently a founding father. Maybe if I'd read it with nothing to do for a week my experience would've been different, but I was too often distracted to commit to the concerns of early-19th century Paris. As such, my feelings about this one are mixed, like with Stendhal's The Red and the Black last year.

I love the expository jags, the proclamations about the behavior of all young men, all women in Paris. The essayistic asides seem...more It's good to study up on the history of the novel -- this one's apparently a founding father. Maybe if I'd read it with nothing to do for a week my experience would've been different, but I was too often distracted to commit to the concerns of early-19th century Paris. As such, my feelings about this one are mixed, like with Stendhal's The Red and the Black last year.

I love the expository jags, the proclamations about the behavior of all young men, all women in Paris. The essayistic asides seem perfectly phrased, always calling for enthusiastic dog-earing, as though I'll one day find on the page the bit of wisdom that struck me the first time through. I'd love to read essays by Balzac, or even a collection of insights into human nature culled from his hundred million novels. Sometimes I was reminded of that bit in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto where David Shields comes clean and says he thinks novels are life-support systems for eloquent articulation of wisdom/theme.

I often sort of muddled through the dramatization, not always sure who was who and what was happening where. (The names/surnames of too many characters start with "V" for me?) Reading this, it became real clear how much we modern readers (ie, "I") rely on chapter breaks and white space between sections or at least clear transitions between scenes. In this, once a scene ends, in the next paragraph a character is propelled across Paris by no more than a hard return. This sort of thing requires an attention I might not always have paid, in part because I wasn't so engaged in the young social climber's upwardly mobile quest? The title character's unconditional love for his daughters is undeniably moving, and maybe also more cloying than Balzac's statements that it's Christ-like. But his daughters I didn't see nearly as well -- and if you don't see someone so well that character is pretty much screwed since being seen by readers gives characters a heartbeat and breath.

So: Loved the wisdom zingers throughout, liked the two major male characters, thought less of minor characters (even Cheat-Death), wasn't so engaged by the plot, and wasn't always sure what was going down in the dramatized bits. Seven stars for the expository jags, but maybe 3.25 stars overall, with respect for the writer's perception and humility for my abilities as a distractable 21st century reader.(less)

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Mar 21, 2013 Maria rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I expected to like this book more, and I didn't absolutely love it perhaps because this is a precurser to the works of Hugo and Zola whose novels I really love, and somehow less refined -- in short, I was kind of disappointed, and I know this author and love him but haven't read him in a while so this may be something too. Here's what I did love: the translator, Ellen Marriage; portrayals (and utterances) of Vautrin and Eugene; despite a slow start, the author's eternal truths interspersed throu...more

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Jun 08, 2007 Cleyton Boson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Balzac is perfect in this book where the good sensibility is mere moral pretend. At first view, Father Goriot is just a good old man that wants the happiness to his daughters. But they don’t love him as he would must be loved. His daughters have shame of him and blame him of his poverty. The good old man suffers cause of this relationship through all novel and end his life in a horrible and pathetic condition.
This is a sad history to you? However, Balzac get become it much more cruel yet. Gorio...more

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Mar 18, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books; 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006-2010)

Shelves: 1001-core, 501, classics

No doubts on my part. This novel deserves a 5-star rating. Challenge my rating if you want and I know I can defend it, tooth and nail.

At first, this seems to be just a story of an old man, Pere Goriot and how he ends up in the pupper's grave despite being a rich businessman when he's still strong. His fault is that he loves and cares for his 2 spoiled uncaring ungrateful daughters who get all his riches and in the end don't even care going to his deathbed. However, that plot seems to be just sec...more

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Sep 27, 2008 Tyler rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone; Dads; Guys

Recommended to Tyler by: BBC Big Read list

Shelves: 19th-century

A distinctive element of this novel stems from its compactness. Most of the action takes place at a boarding house or a couple of other locations in Paris. The setup highlights the interaction between people, and the author’s astute observations about human nature set the story off. Balzac’s prose is superb, and his command of detail gives readers a palpable feel for the lives of people so far removed in time (1819) from us.

Goriot is a father who, among the fellow boarders, finds that rarest of...more

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Aug 24, 2012 David Acevedo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Apr 04, 2007 علی rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-fictions, novels

با وجودی که نام رمان "باباگوریو"ست، واقعه اما حول و حوش زندگی سه شخصیت می گذرد؛ گوریوی مسن، واترن، و دانشجوی ساده دل حقوق به نام اوژن دو راستینیاک که در جنوب فرانسه بزرگ شده و با طبقات بالای شهری بیگانه است. سال های بازگشت بوربون ها پس از ناپلئون است و جامعه ی فرانسه گرفتار تغییرات بزرگی ست، آنقدر که شهر پاریس در حد یک شخصیت رمان توصف شده است. خمیرمایه رمان، روابط خانوادگی در ارتباط با موقعیت های اجتماعی ست. وصف "مزون واکر"، یک خانه ی شراب متعلق به بیوه ای به نام مادام واکر، واترن، یک آشوبگرای م...more با وجودی که نام رمان "باباگوریو"ست، واقعه اما حول و حوش زندگی سه شخصیت می گذرد؛ گوریوی مسن، واترن، و دانشجوی ساده دل حقوق به نام اوژن دو راستینیاک که در جنوب فرانسه بزرگ شده و با طبقات بالای شهری بیگانه است. سال های بازگشت بوربون ها پس از ناپلئون است و جامعه ی فرانسه گرفتار تغییرات بزرگی ست، آنقدر که شهر پاریس در حد یک شخصیت رمان توصف شده است. خمیرمایه رمان، روابط خانوادگی در ارتباط با موقعیت های اجتماعی ست. وصف "مزون واکر"، یک خانه ی شراب متعلق به بیوه ای به نام مادام واکر، واترن، یک آشوبگرای مرموز، و بالاخره ژان زواکیم گوریو، بازنشسته ی ترشی فروش که به زودی در می یابد بخاطر شوهر دادن آبرومندانه ی دو دخترش، ورشکست شده. راستینیاک با وجود اختلاف طبقاتی، با مشورت های دخترعمویش، و تلکه ی پول از خانواده ی فقیرش، جذب طبقه ی بالای شهر پاریس می شود. واترن تلاش می کند راستینیاک را به زن بی شوهری به نام ویکتورین وصل کند اما ابتدا باید برادر زن را از سر راه برداشت. راستینیاک نمی خواهد در این مساله درگیر شود. گوریو که شاهد نزدیک شدن راستینیاک به دخترش دلفین است، از علاقه ی جوان ساده دل حمایت می کند. اما وقتی دختر دیگرش آناستازیا، به او می گوید جواهرات خانواده ی شوهرش را برای پرداخت قروض معشوقه اش، فروخته، پیر مرد از شدت رنج و ناتوانی، سکته می کند. با وجودی که او در بستر مرگ افتاده، دخترانش میلی به دیدار پدر ندارند. حتی در تشییع جنازه ی گوریو، تنها راستینیاک حضور می یابد. پس از مراسم، راستینیاک دلفین را برای شام به بیرون دعوت کرده است؛ "بین خودمان بماند"! همه چیز، حتی مصیبت ها به سادگی و روانی اتفاق می افتند، و می گذرند. ب
اباگوریو را در فارسی با نام م.الف. به آذین (محمود اعتمادزاده) به یاد دارم.
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Dec 07, 2007 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars

The legend of Balzac- the 3-day writing marathons fueled by gallons of coffee, the monks robe, the ridiculously grandiose ambition, the secret passage leading to a back alley used to flee from his creditors- is a most delightful one, and so I was hoping to like this, his most famous book, rather better than I did. Oscar Wilde claimed that Balzac invented the 19th century, which is probably true, but Flaubert's comment rings truer: "What a man he would have been if only he'd known how to write"....more

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Jul 06, 2012 Dagny rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: balzac-honore-de, french, 19th-century, favorites

Father Goriot, a cornerstone of Balzac's Human Comedy is a novel of the obsession and sacrifices of a father for his two spoiled daughters. It intertwines with the life of a young law student beginning his Parisian odyssey and the other denizens of the widow Vauquer's boarding house. The setting is Paris in the 1820s.

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May 20, 2008 Liza rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who like stuff (or people who don't like people who like stuff but want to read about them)

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jun 09, 2008 Stewart rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a grand novel from the old school, pre-Hemingway: long passages of description, speeches that go on for a page, the seeking of fortunes by marrying rich men or women, dowries, and deathbed scenes. But I enjoyed this 1834 novel by Honore de Balzac, the first book I had read of this French author. The novel painstakingly depicts life in Paris after the fall of Napoleon and the Bourbon restoration, the class divisions, the poverty of most of the residents, and the status-seeking of the rich...more

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Dec 15, 2008 Jim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Considered one of Balzac's finest, the action centers around an empoverished boarding house where the father of two society women is living out his days. Once a successful businessman, he has given them almost all the wealth he had accumulated and is now living in poverty. Among the many characters living there is a young student who is neglecting his studies in his quest to enter high society in Paris. He manages to meet the two daughters and is subsequently introduced in all the more desirable...more

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Feb 15, 2013 J. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: french, classic-literature

A young student, Eugene, arrives in Paris from the provinces to take up a place in law school. Given that he is strapped for cash he settles in Madame Vauquer's boarding house populated by colourful Parisians with checkered back stories. It's not long before he is beguiled by Parisien societe and seizes the opportunity to remake the acquaintance of a wealthy distant cousin Madame de Beauseant. He also be-friends a fellow border lonely Old Goriot a man who made his fortune as a vermicelli maker a...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Balzac was considered racy at the turn of the century as anyone who has seen "The Music Man" knows. This is my first Balzac novel and it seemed fairly tame to me, but he does infer that one character is homosexual and paints a clear picture of upper class hanky panky.

Having just finished reading Henry James "The Ambassadors" it was a great relief to open Balzac and find someone who is very descriptive and easy to follow. He begins by describing in detail the boarding house in Paris where a lot...more

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Sep 08, 2012 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Sarah by: Required Reading for Literature Class

Shelves: read-in-2012, european-literature

Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot is a critical examination of Parisian life in the early 1800′s. As the story unfolds, it is clear that corruption reigns, regardless of class, in every household. Ultimately, no one is wealthy to hide the mud in their lives, and every character acts out of self-interest. At the very beginning of the story the narrator briefly addresses the reader: “…after you’ve read all about Père Goriot’s miserable secrets, you’ll have yourself a good dinner and blame your indiff...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Megan Chance rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to say I'm in love with Balzac. Pere Goriot is the story of an old man and his love for his two daughters, who have married extremely well, and yet still demand more and more of him, and his relationship with a young law student, Eugene Rastignac. Like "Lost Illusions," another of Balzac's entries in his wide-reaching Human Comedy, Rastignac has a lot to learn about Paris. Rastignac finds his morality severely compromised as he comes into contact with Paris society and with the villain Va...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Old Man Goriot - Old Goriot - Pere Goriot - whatever the translation's title, know that this is one of the great books of all literature. A masterpiece in its own right, Goriot is also a cornerstone of Balzac's Comedie Humaine. For the Balzac novice, this is the one to start with: If you don't like it, you probably won't like much else he wrote; if you do enjoy it, you're very fortunate because there's so much more Balzac waiting for you. And thanks to Balzac's system of recurring characters, ma...more Old Man Goriot - Old Goriot - Pere Goriot - whatever the translation's title, know that this is one of the great books of all literature. A masterpiece in its own right, Goriot is also a cornerstone of Balzac's Comedie Humaine. For the Balzac novice, this is the one to start with: If you don't like it, you probably won't like much else he wrote; if you do enjoy it, you're very fortunate because there's so much more Balzac waiting for you. And thanks to Balzac's system of recurring characters, many of the people you meet here will turn up elsewhere in his fiction, at different stages of their lives and viewed from different angles.

Among the many vividly depicted characters in this novel is one of my own favorites, Vautrin, about whom I'll say little lest I spoil your initial acquaintance with him. But I can say this: Many people claim that a particular book is life-changing. For me, this book was literally so, in part. I first read it in January 1986, on my way back to the second term of my first year of law school. I vividly remember reading Vautrin's long speech to the student Eugene de Rastignac while I was flying in an airplane from the midwest to Washington, DC. Vautrin's cynical and brilliant anatomizing of the kind of money and the type of ambition needed to succeed in the turbulent society of 1819 Paris left me shaken. I had to set the book aside for a few hours after reading that part. I had the thoroughly disturbing and dispiriting feeling that someone had suddenly told me how life really was. Balzac, speaking across a century and a half made me realize that I didn't have either the desire for money or the career drive to push me on to success in the law. This combined with other personal issues and doubts would lead to me not taking the bar or pursuing that profession, among other associated life decisions.

Balzac had an almost obsessive fascination with money and how it shapes the actions of modern people. His interest in it was deemed vulgar by the critics of his day, and has been seen as prescient in the last hundred years. When I first encountered his work in the "Greed is good" 1980s, he seemed utterly contemporary in outlook. Oddly enough, he's just as current in these early years of a new millennium. As for his characters, well, as Baudelaire famously put it, "In Balzac, even the door-keepers have genius. All his minds are weapons loaded to the muzzle with will - just like Balzac himself." So, if you're interested in reading a prose King-Lear crime-thriller sentimental-education romance-novel social-realist slice-of-life comico-tragedy, with humor and human cruelty and sociological/historical detail of Parisian life in the early 1800s, narrated by one of the most interesting and opinionated voices in fiction, this 250-page novel is the one for you. It was for me and, 26 years on, looks like it always will be.(less)

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Nov 10, 2011 Jim Coughenour rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

"It's a great shame that so many readers owe their first (and often last) contact with French literature to the opening pages of Le Père Goriot," writes Graham Robb in his resplendent biography of Balzac. Balzac begins his book with a pages-long description of the Pension Vaquer, an impoverished boarding house where key characters will come together. I'd have to disagree; Balzac's minute description of this seedy setting, which is also a description of its landlady, Madame Vaquer, is as over-the...more "It's a great shame that so many readers owe their first (and often last) contact with French literature to the opening pages of Le Père Goriot," writes Graham Robb in his resplendent biography of Balzac. Balzac begins his book with a pages-long description of the Pension Vaquer, an impoverished boarding house where key characters will come together. I'd have to disagree; Balzac's minute description of this seedy setting, which is also a description of its landlady, Madame Vaquer, is as over-the-top hilarious as anything in Dickens. The drawing room "gives off a smell for which our language has no special word; it can only be described as a boarding house smell. It smells stuffy, mouldy, rancid; it is chilly, clammy to breathe, permeates one's clothing; it leaves the stale taste of a room where people have been eating; it stinks of backstairs, scullery, workhouse. It could only be described if some process were invented for measuring the quantity of disgusting elementary particles contributed by each resident, young or old, from his own catarrhal and sui generis exhalations. Even so, despite these dull horrors, compared to the dining-room next door the drawing room seems as elegant and sweet smelling as a boudoir." — And we're off…

A long time ago I tried to read Père Goriot in French, and failed. I picked it up recently with bland expectations and found myself chuckling all the way through. Here's where we first meet two of the key characters from his Human Comedy – the young Rastignac and the Mephistophelean arch-criminal Vautrin – but the entire ensemble is pure pleasure: grande dames deserted by their feckless lovers, mean old biddies and faithless daughters and conniving capitalists, all commingling in ambition. No one is virtuous, but some are more clever than others.

As Stephen Vizinczey observed 30 years ago,* "the greatest 19th-century English and American novelists are Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal and Balzac in English." I'm a fan of this translation by A.J. Krailsheimer; it's never fusty and frequently funny. And if you've never read Balzac, this is a great place to begin.
______________________
* Speaking of forgotten classics, I just rated Vizinczey's collection Truth and Lies in Literature, which any lover of literature will love.

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Oct 17, 2011 Justin Bendana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Perhaps it is a good time as ever to read such a book as Old Goriot. Well, I am 20 years old, young, ambitious, a novice, and most of all innocent to the ways of how society works. Of course, I will feel much inclined to like the character of young Eugene Rastignac. Like Eugene, I wanted to be accepted into the upper echelon of society by entering into the legal profession as my parents and i have always dreamed of, but I wanted most of all to be accepted in so called 'modern society' through th...more

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Jun 21, 2011 David Lentz rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Balzac was a most enthusiastic participant of high society in Paris in his heyday principally because it yielded so many characters for his human comedy. Despite the artifice of glamor, wealth and nobility, a young attorney named Rastignac learns that it is shallow, materialistic and vain beyond all sense. Aspiring to make a name for himself, Rastignac stays in a bording house where he meets old Goriot, a vermicelli merchant with two daughters prominent in Paris society. Like King Lear, Goriot l...more

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Jan 08, 2011 Larry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another of Balzac’s studies of Parisian society and class divisions in early 19th century France. The story was initially published in serial form in 1834.

The shady character Vautrin summarized Parisian society to the young student Eugene Rastignac in this way: “If you get splashed with mud riding in a carriage you’re an honest fellow, while you’re a rogue if you get dirty on foot. If you have the bad luck to nab something from somebody you become a peepshow for the crowd at the Place du Palais...more

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Feb 28, 2010 Shelley rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't know how I missed ever reading Balzac but I am glad I found him. I really enjoyed this book. It was depressing and sad but also had a bit of twisted humor in it. Ah the lengths that parents will go to in the pursuit of their children's happiness. That pretty much sums up the whole story. Old Goriot had a comfortable life at one time. He married his daughters to wealthy men but felt he was an embarassment to them (his own daughters and sons in law helped foster these feelings). So he move...more

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Sep 05, 2009 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Jamais une oeuvre plus majesteuesement terrible n'a commandé le cerveau humaine," Balzac wrote in 1834. Almost certainly so! Two main stories cross in this great novel: the story of a young, ambitious provincial, Eugène de Rastignac, who loses innocence in the complex society and moral corruption of Paris; and the tragic story of Old Goriot, who has destroyed himself financially for two daughters who care not at all for him--this latter story somewhat reminiscent of "King Lear." For someone who...more "Jamais une oeuvre plus majesteuesement terrible n'a commandé le cerveau humaine," Balzac wrote in 1834. Almost certainly so! Two main stories cross in this great novel: the story of a young, ambitious provincial, Eugène de Rastignac, who loses innocence in the complex society and moral corruption of Paris; and the tragic story of Old Goriot, who has destroyed himself financially for two daughters who care not at all for him--this latter story somewhat reminiscent of "King Lear." For someone who both loves and fears Paris, as this part-time resident does, the "City of Lights" itself almost functions as the key character in this work. Balzac's comments on Paris, particularly upper-class Parisian society, are magnificent . . . and devilish: "I defy you to walk a couple of yards anywhere in Paris without stumbling on some infernal complication" (p. 90); "Surely Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or physical suffering; but then Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb" (p. 10); "life in Paris is one continual battle" (p. 70); "You have to sit up at night, it seems, if you really want to know all that is going on about you in Paris" (p. 31), etc. And the novel, after all, culminates with Eugène now thoroughly disillusioned, climbing to the heights of Montmarte, looking out over Paris and famously saying, "A nous deux maitenant!" which is rather loosely translated in the Everyman's Library edition as "We'll fight this out, you and I" (I would translate something like, "It's down to the two of us now!") "Old Goriot" is in many ways also a companion novel to "Eugenie Grandet." Both, like so much 19th century literature, is fundamentally about the woes of economic transaction. "Eugenie Grandet" is a story of the destructiveness of a father's stinginess; "Old Goriot" about the destructiveness of a father's generosity. The latter, in the end, is far more tragic . . . as terrible as anything the human brain has conceived, to paraphrase the great author!(less)

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Mar 11, 2011 Venus rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

بابا گوریو، داستان تلاقی سرنوشت انسان‌های گوناگون است که در قالب شخصیت‌های مثبت و منفی عناصر سازنده داستان را تشکیل می‌دهند. بالزاک در این کتاب روایت ماجرایی را پیش می‌برد که حول زندگی جوان شهرستانی ساده‌دلی (اوژن دو راستینیاک) است که به پاریس آمده و در پانسیونی (پانسیون ووکه) که محل اقامت افراد گوناگون و غریبی است اقامت می‌کند. داستان در پاریس بورژوایی قرن نوزدهم رخ می‌دهد. روایت بالزاک در تشریح فضای ویژه این پانسیون و شخصیت پردازی افراد موثر داستان خواننده را به میان ماجراها می‌برد

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Sep 06, 2012 Andy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a pretty good, deep, entertaining read. Interesting life-like characters, a little too much "aside philosophizing" at times that slows the story, and you can see early on this story is not going to end well. It does take some time to get going, but it's quite exciting by the midpoint.

The most interesting and complex character is a gay "criminal mastermind" named Vautrin with a view on life that one ought to use people and cast them aside. He's seen much of life, and considers nothing off...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Margaret rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pere Goriot is my first foray with Honore de Balzac. While I am familiar with 19th century British texts, my knowledge of the French 19th century novel is more limited. However, like his British counterparts, Balzac writes rich descriptions and thick prose that create a density that is both inspiring and exhausting. Paris comes alive in this novel, and becomes the most intriguing of the characters in Pere Goriot. Both Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens said Balzac inspired their own fictions, and I...more

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Sep 09, 2011 Juanita Rice rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Intrigued by the frequency with which 20th-century theorists Bakhtin and Lukacs cite Balzac as the quintessential modern novelist , I decided to read some Balzac at last, and found a 1959 Penguin translation by M.A. Crawford. I had amazingly missed Balzac altogether in my undergraduate French major. The very name Balzac causes a delicious shudder for the Iowa ladies in the musical play Music Man, so perhaps Balzac was too socially radical for my era in the Bible Belt. Curious.
I had a hard time...more Intrigued by the frequency with which 20th-century theorists Bakhtin and Lukacs cite Balzac as the quintessential modern novelist , I decided to read some Balzac at last, and found a 1959 Penguin translation by M.A. Crawford. I had amazingly missed Balzac altogether in my undergraduate French major. The very name Balzac causes a delicious shudder for the Iowa ladies in the musical play Music Man, so perhaps Balzac was too socially radical for my era in the Bible Belt. Curious.
I had a hard time getting started with the book, partly because protracted description of a boarding house in a poor area of Paris in 1819 failed to give me a clear picture or to make me understand why Balzac insisted it was dreary. The other cause of resistance was fear that it would be too pitiful, with innocents suffering either in silence or in page after page of mournful emotions. Somehow, however, I began to trust Balzac, whose authorial voice from the very beginning seems almost contemporary, sensible and serious, and even intimate. He stresses his intention to tell the story truthfully: "All is true!" he avers, writing it in English in the original for emphasis. "Will it be understood outside Paris? One may doubt it. Only between the heights of Montmartre and Montrouge are there people who can appreciate how exactly, with what close observation, it is drawn from life." I finally became enrapt with the story and the narrator so much that I plan to read more Balzac, perhaps even tackling it in French!
A sketch of the story: young Eugene Rastignac has come to Paris from the provinces to study law and lives on the meagre support of his family who, although poor, have distant connections to nobility, and provide him with an introduction to a pivotal Paris socialite. He becomes dazzled and obsessed with wealth and success and infatuated with its elegant beauties, both the women and the lifestyle. Meanwhile he lives in the aforesaid "dreary boarding house" with an aged man, Goriot, who is "despised by all the others." "There always is such a laughing-stock" in social groups, Balzac observes. "By what chance had the oldest lodger drawn on him this half-spiteful
contempt, this half-pitying persecution, this lack of respect for misfortune? Perhaps he had laid himself open to them by those vagaries and eccentricities which the world forgives less easily than vices. These questions go to the root of many social injustices."
When Eugene discovers and discloses that Goriot is, incredibly, the father of two of the most bewitching and extravagant young women Eugene has seen, the boarders change their attitudes toward the impoverished man whom they had thought dreary, probably dissolute, certainly mindless, and the stage is nearly set.
In addition to being a counterpoint to young Eugene's personal ambitions with those same daughters, Goriot's relevance lies precisely in his "fatherhood." I find translators' decisions to call English version Old Goriot, strange: it is not Goriot's age that is at issue, but what the French title Pere Goriot means in full. It means most directly "Father Goriot," and Goriot is an absolutely devoted father, his joys only those of his daughters and his personal griefs reduced to theirs also. A joking medical student interested in one of the century's early pseudo-sciences, phrenology, feels Goriot's skull for keys to his personality: "I've had a look at his head," says Bianchon. "There's only one bump on it—the bump of paternity; he will be an Eternal Father," (a joke on "Heavenly Father" as we say it in today's English). Already, when Eugene meets Goriot, the retired merchant had settled his fortune almost completely between the daughters to procure them good marriages, and been reduced by his own consent to living more austerely than any of the other boarders. We can also see "Pere Goriot" as "Pops" Goriot, and thus "Pere" can mean both a kind of old humble fool, as well as being a beatific symbol
As the story unfolds, the characters all take on more personality, and more involvement in the plot. A fascinating temptation is laid out for Eugene by another most interesting lodger, a well-spoken rather bold and influential man. This Monsieur Vautrin outlines for him the endless drudgery that awaits Eugene if he should try to work himself up into the freedom and pleasures of the world he sees with such desire, the world of wealth and influence and beauty and leisure. On the other hand, he offers Eugene immediate access to that world, in a wife worth at least a million francs, a fresh young girl who is already half in love with him, if Eugene will only consent to share 200,000 of it, that and consent to the death which Vautrin assures him will instantly befall the only person who stands in the way, a selfish dolt, a simpleton.
What will Eugene choose? What awaits him as he attempts to win the hearts of elegant society beauties, women about whose happiness he is constantly asked by Father Goriot who begs Eugene to recount their social successes at a ball or at the opera, their clothes, their appearances. What will become of Father Goriot? When does affection become foolish infatuation? When do principles represent only a shallow naivete?
It's a simple but intricate plot, and even the Countess Anastasie and Baroness Delphine, as well as several of the seemingly "untouchable" nobles, develop complexities of character that I did not expect. In short, this is indeed a "modern novel" and not a melodrama, although suffering is extreme. But the suffering is extreme because the social system is extreme: Eugene early learns that, in Balzac's words, "human beings are packed in strata, layer above layer, in the framework of society." The way these strata relentlessly press, influence, and shape human destiny is Balzac's real subject matter. and it is this "realistic" sense of class that marks Balzac as such an original writer at the time, prefiguring modernism at its full more than naturalism or the realism of mere verisimilitude.
Pere Goriot is one of forty-four Balzac novels published from 1828 until the author's death, in a sequence that Balzac designated in 1842 as The Human Comedy (La Comedie Humaine). He envisioned the eventual creation of many more with perhaps 4,000 characters in all, and explained this intention in a famous Preface that year, sketching the way he wanted to portray characters from every aspect of society during his era: from the civil wars of the French Revolution, to Napoleon, and the Restoration. He did not then know about the abortive Parisian Revolution to come in 1850, the year of his death and the year in which all hope of a society of equality for nineteenth-century France finally ended, perhaps. Or was that what killed him?
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Sep 19, 2012 Violetta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had misapprehensions about reading this novel. A fleeting knowledge of Balzac's works and style was all I came armed with. An aging man, dubbed Old Goriot by his fellow lodgers, who receives sporadic company from some mysterious young beauties and is held in contempt for it, though he professes that they are his daughters, is the central figure around which this Comedie humaine revolves. The main protagonist, Eugene Rastignac, befriends the old man, at first with a selfish eye, aiming to use G...more

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About Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders o...more Honoré de Balzac was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Jack Kerouac, as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting himself to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life, and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed as a legal clerk, but he turned his back on law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician. He failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.

Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; he died five months later.
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Pere Goriot (La Comédie Humaine)

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