Old Goriot (1835)

I had Old Goriot recommended as a place to start with Honore de Balzac, and it worked well. It's set in post-Napoleonic Paris, and at various times made me think both of King Lear and Charles Dickens. There is a strong cynical view of upper vs. lower classes in it. Old Goriot had become wealthy via his vermicelli (!) business, and was able to set up his two daughters in marriages to aristocratic gentlemen. To help finance them, he lives modestly in a boarding house. The book begins with what for me was a dense and lengthy foundation-setting involving the boarding house's inhabitants, but once that was done the novel became much more engaging.

The other central character is law student Eugene Ratsignac, a largely pure-hearted young man who wants to make his way in Parisian society. He has little money, which normally would make such advancement impossible, but he has an aristocratic family connection that gets him some initial footing on that social ladder. A cousin is willing to help him, and soon he makes a powerful romantic ally.

Old Goriot lives for the happiness of his daughters, and they take every advantage of his generosity with little demonstration of paternal affection. Their husbands don't want him around, and he lives for brief glimpses of his daughters. Eugene comes to appreciate Goriot's sacrifice, and the nobility of his soul.

Turns out that Dickens was indeed influenced by Balzac, and there's even a Magwitch-type character in Old Goriot, the ex-convict Vauterin, except his aims are self-benefit rather than recompense. Vauterin tests Eugene's honesty, and Goriot's treatment by his daughters and their husbands, among other things, opens Eugene's eyes to the often vicious nature of Parisian high society. In this book and others Balzac apparently broke from a more romantic tradition and provided a realism that readers hadn't seen before. Old Goriot provides a vivid and unflattering picture of Paris in that era, as two more noble spirits try to negotiate their way through it. ( )

A powerful character study of the driving force behind humanity: money. The almighty dollar defines and influences society and holds court over its moral choices. Balzac deftly illustrates the extent to which people will go to procure wealth, or at least the illusion of wealth, in 19th century Parisian society. A young man learns this painful truth as he is initiated into the adult world. “Golden chains are the heaviest of all fetters...Henceforth there is war between us.” This timeless message is repeated throughout Balzac’s work. ( )

This review has been crossposted from my blog Review from The Cosy Dragon Please head there for more in-depth reviews by me.

'Pere Goriot', or Old Father Goriot, is a realist text which is difficult initially to understand and read. There are a number of characters, including Goriot himself and the irredeemable Rastignac, who focalize the novel. This novel is translated from French. If you want an in-depth experience of 'real' Paris, this will be good for you.

The first 100 or so pages of the novel are impossible to get into. It is all just setting the scene for the 'action'. If you persevere, you will find some more satisfying plot developments, but nothing that really shouts at you to read on. In the end, I found myself reading just to see what would happen to poor old Goriot, who got the death I expected.

If you do suddenly find yourself attached to any of the characters, this novel is part of a set 'The Human Comedy'. Balzac made it his mission to catalog the entirety of Parisian society, and most of this is contained within his published works. Balzac died before he completed it, but this is a project that I feel he probably never would have been satisfied with .

This novel is a great example of realism! There is a heavy focus on detailed settings, as if you are really walking the streets of Paris. A number of the characters seem like placeholders, while others are fully fleshed out. I don't think anyone feels real emotion for the characters, for everything is already set out for them. They seem to not try escape their sorry lot, and Rastignac in particular is quite a repugnant person.

This is not something I would enjoy reading for pleasure. As a text in a literature degree, it was a good one to study though, as it was filled with details that I could use for analysis. My version has a set of essays in the second half of the book, which was interesting and useful reading. It is good to know some historical background before setting out into the book.

Keep in mind that this is translated from French, so each translator may potentially put a different spin on things. Also, if you're going to buy it online, make sure to get the English version! ( )

It is difficult to read the sections of this novel that deal with Père Goriot as a father and not think of King Lear -- but King Lear without any Cordelia. These sections, in which his role as a father who sacrifices his wealth and his happiness to his two hideously ungrateful daughters, are the ones in which the original title of "Father" Goriot is most important, and are also the ones that are most painful for the reader. But this novel is much more than the story of Goriot and his daughters. Instead, through the lens of the denizens of a run-down (but "respectable") boarding house in 1819/1820 Paris, Balzac creates a picture of the breadth of Parisian society, from the hereditary nobility on down to the criminals and pawnbrokers.

Much of the story follows Eugène de Rastignac, the son of a somewhat impoverished provincial noble family, who comes to Paris to study law. He stays in the boarding house of Madame Vauquer, along with a variety of others, including not only Goriot but also a mysterious but compelling man named Vautrin and a young woman, Victorine, whose extremely rich father has abandoned her, both of whom play major roles in the plot. Through a noble relative, who is at the height of Parisian society, Rastignac meets first one and then two lovely women, sisters, who turn out to be Goriot's two daughters who have married into the second tier of Parisian society, wealthy men and women who are not hereditary nobles. He finds this world of wealth and social entertaining extremely seductive, and borrows money from his loving family to fund a new set of clothes that will enable him to enter it. Partly this is Rastignac's coming of age story, as he moves from being a naive provincial young man who doesn't know his way around Parisian society to the suitor of one of the daughters, Delphine de Nucingen. However, at the same time that Rastignac is paying court to Delphine, Vautrin has cooked up a plot to help Victorine get her father's money and marry Rastignac.

Rastignac doesn't completely lose his sense of honesty and compassion as he enters a world in which both husbands and wives have other lovers: he pays his family back (albeit by gambling) and is kind to Goriot, who is despised and almost tormented by the other denizens of the boarding house (who thought the two elegant young women visiting him were prostitutes, not his daughters). Because much of the plot deals with the goings-on in the boarding house, where Goriot is not thought of as a father, it didn't bother me that the translator calls him old man Goriot instead of Father Goriot, something SassyLassy raised in her review of this book. The book is largely about love and money and how they are intertwined -- or not: at one point, Rastignac muses "Vautrin is right. Wealth equals virtue." But, of course, it doesn't.

Some of the plot seemed a little melodramatic to me, but overall this book vividly portrays life in Paris during this post-revolutionary period, sometimes in incredible detail, from the location and decor of the house to the appearance and behavior of the characters to slang trends of the times to which tradesman give credit and how various diseases are treated. Each character is fully developed, and the sights and sounds of Paris come alive. Balzac was one of the first "naturalistic" French writers, one tried to describe life as it really was and who inspired other authors such as Zola. He can also be quite funny in places. This is the first of his works I've read, and while I don't think I'll become as enthused about Balzac as I am about Zola, I will probably read more of his work.

Real love and real money. You may have neither, you may have one, but is it ever possible to have both? This is the question at the heart of [Père Goriot], set in the Paris of 1819. Throw in social standing and the conundrum becomes almost impossible to resolve.

Balzac asks on the very first page, "Will anyone understand it outside Paris?" The dilemmas in this most heart wrenching of novels can be understood by all readers. The times may have changed completely, but each new generation faces these quandaries anew.

Madame Vauquer runs a barely respectable boarding house in one of those districts you would never notice, because you would have no reason to go there. She has a group of long term boarders who breakfast and often dine together in the communal dining room. Monsieur Goriot was one of those boarders. At first Madame welcomed him enthusiastically for his fine linen and his ample rent. He had one of the best apartments in the house, but in the two years preceding the novel, his financial situation had altered drastically. He was now in a garret in the attic; he was now Père Goriot.

In his introduction, the editor and translator A J Krailsheimer refers to other translations where the novel and Goriot are called Old Goriot. He makes the case strongly that this does Goriot and the book a disservice, for without his role of father, both real and symbolic, there would be no story.

In his working life, Goriot had been a highly successful vermicelli merchant. His wealth had allowed him to provide munificently for his two daughters. He was able to marry them off, well above what could have been expected of his social position, but not into the elite, for after all, although wealthy, he was "in trade". Unfortunately, Père Goriot had never taught his daughters restraint. They used and abused his love for them, manipulating it to bankroll their affairs. This incessant drain had led to the decline in Goriot's fortunes, reducing him to the penury we find him in at the beginning of the book.

Eugène de Rastignac, a young law student, also lives at Maison Vauquer. Poor and from the provinces, he is dazzled by Parisian life. Not the life he lives, the life he sees and dreams of on the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Eugène is clever enough to realize that only connections will get him an introduction there; only money will keep him there. Luckily for him, he is distantly related to Madame de Beauséant, a woman at the top of society. He has his entrée, now he needs money.

His yearning for society life and the money to get there are quickly intuited by a third resident of the boarding house, the mysterious Vautrin. Unbeknownst to his fellow boarders, Vautrin is a former convict, in hiding from the police. He has strong connections to the underworld and access to large amounts of money.

[Père Goriot] follows these three men, linking Rastignac and Goriot through the latter's daughters, and linking Rastignac and Vautrin in a psychological struggle testing Rastignac's limits. This novel of most decidedly secular concerns has suggestions of the New Testament: Vautrin's betrayal by a former prostitute while at dinner with his friends and his counsel as he is led away, Goriot's personal Stations of the Cross as his fortunes wane, the personal sacrifices of the meek. There is a definite ending here, but no happy conclusion. Did anyone learn anything? You'll have to decide for yourself.

While I have always been a devoted Dickens fan, [Père Goriot] seemed to me to be the novel Dickens wished he could write. If you love nineteenth century literature, this is highly recommended.