Père Goriot in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jan 23, 2015 Sara rated it liked it

Shelves: family, 19th-century-literature, gutenberg-download, french

Pere Goriot is the story of a father who ruins himself to indulge his too thankless, heartless daughters. Eugene Rastignac is a young man of aristocratic blood and abject poverty, who comes to Paris to study law and takes up residence in the same boarding house with Goriot. The “father” that is added to Goriot’s name is a taunt from his fellow boarders, who know little of his actual situation, while it should, in fact, be a testament to the only relationship in life that has meaning for him.

Rast Pere Goriot is the story of a father who ruins himself to indulge his too thankless, heartless daughters. Eugene Rastignac is a young man of aristocratic blood and abject poverty, who comes to Paris to study law and takes up residence in the same boarding house with Goriot. The “father” that is added to Goriot’s name is a taunt from his fellow boarders, who know little of his actual situation, while it should, in fact, be a testament to the only relationship in life that has meaning for him.

Rastignac becomes involved with the daughters in his attempt to scramble his way into a Paris society that values only money and is more concerned with outward image than it could ever be with inward character. This false allure of great wealth begins to eat at Rastignac’s morality and his integrity, and it is primarily the example of unrewarded sacrifice in Pere Goriot that makes him harken at all to the teachings of his own father and mother, teachings he tends to forget and sublimate to ambition and corruption.

There is so little of sincerity or genuine emotion outside of Goriot himself, that I wonder at the depths to which the citizens of Paris had plunged following the reign of Napoleon. I kept reminding myself that these wealthy people were the remnants of an aristocracy that had been decimated and must have wondered what its function was beyond live for today, for tomorrow you may die, or members of a rising merchant class that knew little of how to handle great wealth. There is manipulation on a major scale, relationships based on nothing beyond money, delusion in almost everyone, including Goriot and Rastignac, and betrayal of everything sacred or imaginable.

The overriding themes in this novel are surely pertinent to today. Money and its trappings will lure you in and leave you lonely; overindulgence of children will destroy character; the easy road to wealth is probably a corrupt one--what you did not work for will not serve you well; you cannot buy love; temptation comes sometimes with a smooth voice and a quick smile, beware; and there are things in life worth holding on to, which can be lost far too easily, and those include genuine friendship and the love and devotion of your family.

Perhaps Balzac attempted to cover too many themes in this work, which is what made it seem spotty and incomplete for me. There were moments of interest and moments when I found myself nodding off, my mind wandering so badly that I needed to begin sections again.

There is a Faustian element, with the naive Rastignac pitted against the temptations of the slick Vautin, that I felt was most abruptly severed. In similar fashion, Victorine’s story seemed incomplete as well...a story that Balzac meant to write and then discarded. In fact, what I mostly felt at the end of the novel was a temptation to exclaim “Is that all there is?

I had read this novel somewhere in my ancient past, but any plot element I had attributed to it was wrong. I realized that I had transferred pieces of Silas Marner to it, and that is a different father’s tale altogether. It is not a bad novel or one I would rail against reading; it is however one I will be sure not to revisit, and being done with Pere Goriot, I will be done with Balzac as well. His writing style is not particularly suited to my tastes, and the world of print is awash with other authors I truly want to explore more fully. ...more

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