Lost Illusions (1837)

This is a beautifully written book, but OMG, some readers are going to hate main character Lucien Chardon! I kind of hate him. He is a whiney, immature, ungrateful, gullible, vain, thoughtless, two-timing, petty, egotistical, superficial, unrepentant, spoiled little brat. Yeah, I think I do hate him. Yet… through much of the novel, I was routing for him to succeed! The problem is, I hate him because I see in him all the unforgivable failings I had at his age. Despite all his faults, he isn’t evil, he’s just a self-centered youth- as we’ve all been at one time- trying to gain a foothold in a hostile and corrupt world. That doesn’t excuse him (or myself), but I think some of these character traits must be hardwired into the human personality, programmed to emerge when it is time to leave the nest and establish one‘s independence. As an upstart poet, Lucien dreams of fame and fortune in the literary circles of Paris of the 1820’s. His path is littered with conniving agents, exploitative publishers, jealous colleagues prone to plagiary, corrupt editors, backstabbing critics, fickle bookshop owners, and social climbers who see him as a threat. As I read this, I kept hearing Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction pre-execution sermon from Ezekiel 25:17 in the back of my mind- as Balzac no doubt intended me to."The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. Unfortunately, my Bible doesn’t say it as cool as that, and Lucien isn’t as badass as Samuel L. Jackson. Still, this book was a pleasure to read, and should be especially fun for anybody interested in the inner workings of the publishing world-1820 or present day. I have no experience with that industry, but it seems like everything Balzac describes could be true today. More importantly to the general reader, Lost Illusions is a compassionately told coming-of-age story. Lucien begins, still quite naïve at twenty-one, working in a printshop in the countryside town of Angoulême. In his spare time, he dreams up beautiful poetry and writes novels, which everybody in his little cow town tells him are fantastic… but what do they know? His stuff isn’t actually all that great, but as a big fish in a tiny pond, he starts to believe he could take the Parisian literary world by storm.

Okay…show of hands: how many people reading this were at the top of their class in high school, but got a rude awakening in college, when they discovered how many other bright and talented people are out there? Yeah, me too. Just because Mom puts your drawings up on the refrigerator doesn’t mean the Metropolitan Museum of Art will come knocking on your door. That‘s a hard lesson for some. The first casualty in this book is Lucien’s idealism, when he realizes that lofty ideas don’t pay the bills. His initial Parisian friends are a group of starving artist writers, and for a while, they all seem very romantic to him… the idea of being monastically dedicated to one’s craft. He rooms with Daniel d’Arthez- a truly magnificent talent, who spends each waking moment and every precious penny perfecting his sublime prose. In comparison, Lucien can see how inferior his own stories are, but he lacks the dedication or patience to develop his writing. He soon tires of living in squalor, being socially shunned by the beautiful actresses who work in the theater district not far from his apartment (chicks want guys with skills). When the opportunity arises, Lucian sells out and takes a job writing snarky celebrity gossip and trash novels. In short, he goes all Stephenie Meyers on us, except Stephenie at least got paid. Lucien isn’t even smart enough to be a successful sell-out. He becomes part of the machine without hardly knowing there is a machine. You see, at this point, he just thinks Paris is a big city with no compassion. That’s only the half of it. Actually, the place is filled with sharks single-mindedly hunting starry-eyed newbies like himself. Balzac details how fresh talent routinely gets ensnared in contracts with grotesquely unfair terms of employment. Publishers then encourage a lavish lifestyle in their writers, advancing them pay at exorbitant interest. All the while, the new guy gets assignments on the gossip columns, spreading malicious rumors designed to achieve the publisher’s various social and political aims. Once the writer accumulates enough ill will, the publisher steps in and preserves his own reputation by publicly renouncing the columnist and firing him- leaving him deep in debt and with a demolished reputation, so he can’t establish a competing publication. A rare talent might be spared this fate, but Lucien isn’t that good. This is a very routine business model for scoundrels like Leusteau, whom Lucian initially takes as a friend. Naturally, Lucien’s got no idea any of this is going on, so it is painful to watch the scheme unfold.

Oh… I see I am sinking into a blow-by-blow summary of the book. That’s no good. It’s just that there are so many twists and turns I want to tell you about. Some funny, some tragic. Lucien’s first love: the snobby and capricious Louise d‘Bargeton… what a disaster! I’m sure everybody has an embarrassing first love story, but Lucien will have you grinding your molars on just about every page. He tries to compete with the much wealthier and more sophisticated Sixte du Châtelet for Louise’s affections…it isn’t pretty. There’s a dual with pistols… oh, make that two duals with pistols, sneaking around in the middle of the night, riding carriages under assumed identities, checking into hotels under aliases, syrupy sappy love letters, sugary embarrassing poems about “all the angels sing her praises, and the flowers bloom for but a chance to see her face!” ROTFLMAO! Yeah, we’ve all been there. There are lots of illusion to be lost here, and Louise performs the task ably. She feeds his tender heart into the wood chipper -not once, but twice!

Then there are all the lost illusions with society: Lucien joins the company of gentlemen he looks up to, only to find they are not gentlemanly at all. He works earnestly for a political newspaper, only to discover the cynical motivations for their politics. He holds men of title and position in high regard, only to discover the titles are empty, and their positions ill-gained. These are such timeless themes. There are echoes of this in probably a thousand novels, The Citadel, The Jungle, House of God and The Idiot, just off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of more. This novel isn’t special because the themes are original. It is special because Balzac tells the tale so well. He managed to make me feel sorry for Lucien, little twerp that he is. He made me feel outrage at devious bastards like Cointet brothers. He made me feel like I really have a sense of what Paris in 1820 might have been like (in fact, he goes into a lot of fun details about the legal and financial institutions extant in France of 1820. There’s a whole subplot about what amounts to an illegal wire transfer- before the age of wire transfers! ) The story is an old one, but it still stirs a sense of tragedy. This is a wicked world we live in. I’d rather be in a kinder place, where idealistic fools like Lucien aren‘t slaughtered like sheep to make rich men richer, but alas, that happens all the time. I don’t have children, but I can only imagine what it must be like to send them out into the world, knowing what a hostile place it is, and knowing that however much they might have already guessed at its corruption, there’s still so much more for them to learn. Author Honoré de Balzac’s bio at the front suggests that some of this story is autobiographical. I can believe it; it’s written with such heart.

Lest you walk away from this review thinking Lost Illusions is just an endless parade of defeatist doom and gloom, I can tell you that it definitely is not. The end makes up for everything. For one thing, Lucien comes to realize the value of friends whom you can trust and family who will stick by you through rough times. Lucien returns to Angoulême, and sees the unsophisticated townspeople with new eyes. He appreciates his hard working mother and doting sister, as he never had before. Is this starting to sound like a “Hallmark theater” ending? That's what I thought, but suddenly everything takes an unexpected turn. Lucien tries to save his brother-in-law's business and botches it badly. He goes off into the sunset to commit suicide, and that's when things get crazy. You know how sometimes when you're at the last 50 pages or so of a 700+ page book, and you kind of feel like things are winding down, and you can start writing your review? Well, I was starting to feel like that and then BLAMMO! In comes this insane Spanish diplomat character, who may or may not also be one of Satan's agents, sent directly from hell to negotiate for Lucien's soul. He floors everybody with a convoluted and compelely non-sequitur story about some assistant undersecretary at the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who has a paper-eating fetish, and who starts a war because he can't help himself from eating a secret peace negotiation his king had signed... but he actually did quite well for himself later in life, after marrying a wealthy woman.
Wait! So is France at war now? Oh, no... all this happened ages ago! I was shaking, with tears rolling down my face, wondering WTF is this???!?!?!?! It was wonderful. THEN THE DIPLOMAT KEEPS GOING, with a rant for the ages about how France [of 1820] has lost its morality, and how the justice system is really just a means for the rich to maintain the status quo; how the social caste system will excuse any moral offense, if only the perpetrator is wealthy, famous, or beautiful; and how the church and king put on airs of morality and civility, but by their actions anybody can see that material success is the supreme justification of any action whatsoever; and how there is no significant difference between Napolean, the Medici Family and common criminals- they all just prey on the middle class, who deserve everything they get, if they put up with it. It's just so... so, delicious. Maybe I will develop a paper eating fetish, just so I can eat this book, and feel its papery awesomeness flowing through my veins. When the story finally wraps up, some of the bad guys win, some of the good guys lose, but Lucien's sister Eve, and her husband David- the only genuinely respectable people in the entire novel- are at least happy. This has got to be one of the best novel endings I have ever read. Seriously, this is going on my "desert island picks" shelf. And WTF haven’t heard of this novel before? There are "classics" out there which aren't half as good as this. The bright side, I suppose, is that its obscurity means that the vast universe of books still contains some surprises.

Listen to me read this review HERE.
It's all part of my My Big Audio Project. ( )

Diziam do Balzac que ele concorria abertamente com o registro civil. E que ele falava de seus personagens como pessoas reais.
Desde o início o autor fala da queda de Lucien de Rubempré, pois era óbvio o que aconteceria. As palavras dele sobre sociedade, mercado editorial e jornalismo são brilhantes.
Balzac não descreve personagens planos. David Séchard, Éve e Madame Chardon são bons, íntegros, trabalhadores, mas não são perfeitos, porque foram eles que mimaram Lucien e o tornaram indolente, inconstante, presunçoso e ingênuo.
O Cenáculo e Daniel D'Arthez são muito interessantes.
Outra coisa que dizem do Balzac e que eu adoro é que Ilusões Perdidas poderia ser um subtítulo para toda a Comédia Humana. ( )

In this tale of ambition and betrayal, friendship and revenge, deviousness and even devotion, Balzac explores the worlds of Paris and the provinces, of literature and journalism, of business and money-lending, of art and science, and of aristocratic pride versus bourgeois striving. It is a sweeping story that begins with two friends in a small town in southwest France. David Séchard has returned from an apprenticeship in Paris to take over, in an onerous and unfair transaction, his miserly father's printing business; Lucien Chardon, the son of a dead pharmacist, is a budding poet who has managed to be introduced to Madame de Bargeton, the leading lady of the titled set. David, who has dreams of making a fortune by inventing a way to make paper much more cheaply, falls in love with Lucien's sister Eve.

From there, the reader follows Lucien as he makes inroads with Mme de Bargeton,who encourages him to call himself Lucien de Rubempré, after his mother's titled family. He winds up in Paris, where he first falls in with a group of ambitious but principled young men in a variety of fields who debate ideas and generously help each other, but later is seduced by another group of young men who show him how he can make money through the corrupt field of cultural/political journalism, a field which enables him not only to get paid for his columns, which make him the talk of the town, but also to get free books and theater tickets which he can turn around and resell. As a theater journalist, Lucien meets a young (16-year-old) actress, Coralie, who is being kept by an older married man. They fall in love, and essentially live off the generosity of the married man. At least for a while. Plots are hatched, and counterplots are hatched, and Lucien winds up in dire financial straits that lead him to take a step that puts his dear friend David and his beloved sister Eve at risk. Meanwhile, back in the provinces, David has been toiling incessantly at his invention, while losing business in the print shop which is eyed covetously by his competitors, the rapacious, scheming, and very successful Cointet brothers. Much drama ensues.

The plot is complex, and the characters many, but through them Balzac paints a picture of corruption and duplicity in many facets of French life, both in Paris and in the provinces, where to some extent it's every man for himself. While a few characters epitomize goodness and generosity, including Eve (almost unbelievably good!) and the writer d'Arthez, it is the corrupt and evil characters who truly spring to life, as step by step Lucien loses not only his illusions but his integrity. In many ways, this is a profoundly depressing book.

Those who have read Père Goriot will re-encounter Rastignac and, at the very end, a mysterious Spanish priest who is not at all what he seems. I am now reading A Harlot High and Low, in which Lucien returns to Paris under the "protection" of this Spanish priest.

My Modern Library edition, translated by Kathleen Raine, had some good notes at the back illuminating contemporary cultural references and more; unfortunately, they were referenced only by page number and not in the text itself, which made finding them when I needed them into guesswork.

ETA I forgot to mention that there were several places where Balzac refers to Jews in stereotypical and insulting ways; I took these as signs of the times, but they were still disconcerting. He also can be somewhat insulting to women, again probably a sign of the times. I have learned that Balzac held political view that were very conservative and royalist, but he doesn't seem to let that get in the way of portraying a variety of people, although he doesn't seem (in the two books I've read so far) to have much compassion for the poor.

Although this book paints a wonderful picture of life in Paris in the early 19th century, something about the pacing stops working for me near the end. Possibly it's the long backtracking to fill in the reader on what has been happening with David and Eve since Lucien left that makes me feel like I've lost the thread of the story, and it would work better for me if there were short sections on Lucien's sister's family throughout his story so they ran more or less concurrently. Still, for the first five hundred or so pages it is a brilliant story of what happens when ambition outreaches talent and work ethic. ( )

Le Pere Goriot is a fine book because of the character Vautrin. Vautrin makes a brief but memorable appearance in Illusions Perdues.
Lost Illusions is an epic tale of social mobility with Balzac displaying his superior fleshed out characters and describing a world in its startling detail. This man understands the society he inhabited and human nature in general. ( )