0730 | Lost Illusions | Honore de Balzac
Context: Had to remove six lovely chimney pots from rental properties while reading this.
The primary importance of Lost Illusions lies in exemplifying that it wasn’t only English readers who suffered from 19th century writers’ predeliction to create unnecessarily long novels via serialisation in newsprint.
Balzac can write. He’s great at it. By the time he began Lost, he’d already proved that through enduring classics such as Eugenie Grandet and Pere Goriot. But those novels seemed to have gone to his head a bit as he conceived illusions (now lost) of grandeur for his writing. These took the form of La Comedie Humaine a vast literary outpouring that consists of over 90 works in just about as many genres.
Lost Illusions formed part of this idea (as did everything else eventually). And, as the work was part of a much more massive collection, Balzac seems to have persuaded himself that pace and plot were far less important than minute descriptions of the characters’ experiences. Of course ‘minute’ here is used relatively to the age in which the work was birthed; Proust was to take Balzac’s ideas to the extreme.
The illusions that are lost in this novel consist chiefly of that of Lucien a young man from a provincial town who sincerely believes he is a great poet and heads off to Paris to allow the world to gaze at his beauty on the greatest stage of all. Needless to say, he gets a reality check.
But that reality check is a long time coming. Meanwhile, in the provinces, his sister and brother in law are going through reality checks of their own. After a brief period of happiness as they discover their mutual love, Balzac gets down to the gritty reality of grinding poverty and being taken for a ride by the unscrupulous rich. Don’t hold your breath for a happy ending there… or at least one that satisfies you.
It’s well-written if you can ignore long diatribes where Lucien and his colleagues hold forth about the the travails of the Parisian journalist (yawwwn), but it does go on a bit and can be a tad hard going in places. If you’ve read Proust though, you’ll be fine.
