What do you think?
Rate this book
Balzac: A Biography
“Honoré de Balzac was one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived, and now at last he has a biography that tells his story in a way Balzac himself would have loved―with all the ambiguities, the flaws, the illusions and myths, the realities of street and salon, the loves and affairs, and above all the imperishable stories that still have the power to make us laugh out loud in one minute and weep in the next. Robb has given us a splendid tale, meticulously researched, lovingly put together, and beautifully told. Those who know Balzac will not be able to put his book down; those who don’t know him will rush from this biography to the literary treasures created by the writer Robb describes for us in prose that does justice to its subject.” ―Richard Marius, author of Thomas A Biography In the first major English biography of Honore de Balzac for over fifty years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. As colorful as the world he described, Balzac is the perfect subject for a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes; a passionate collector, inventor, explorer, and political campaigner; a mesmerizing storyteller with the power to make his fantasies come true. Balzac's early life was a struggle against literary disappointment and poverty, and he learned his trade by writing a series of lurid commercial novels. Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of hare-brained entrepreneurial schemes which took him to the remotest parts of Europe and into a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence. Out of these experiences emerged some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition. Skillfully interweaving the life with the novels, Robb presents Balzac as one of the great tragi-comic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and still is, immense.
576 pages, Paperback
Published January 17, 1996
About the author
Graham Robb
26 books137 followersGraham Macdonald Robb FRSL (born June 2, 1958) is a British author.
Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.
He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. In 2007, he won the Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France.
On April 28, 2008 he was awarded the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in London for The Discovery of France.
Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.
He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. In 2007, he won the Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France.
On April 28, 2008 he was awarded the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in London for The Discovery of France.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 10, 2017
Most biographies are flawed in the relationship between author and subject. It's a flaw if the author is overawed by the subject and a flaw if the author obviously despises the subject. It's also a flaw when the author uses the subject's life (particularly in literary biography) mainly to demonstrate the author's own deep perspicacity. There appear to be very few Boswells in the world. In other words, authors who are invigorated and refreshed by their love and respect for their subject.
Which is all by the by when it comes to Graham Robb on Balzac. Because Graham Robb, to me at least, has found the perfect medium between all of these extremes of failure. Robb's knowledge of his subject is complete, including not only Balzac's life but of Balzac's work and all criticism of Balzac's work. And Robb's treatment of his subject's life combines a very judicious balance of deep respect and sufficient irony to convince us that Robb has an appropriate perspective on the essential human-ness even of great writers.
It's always hard, I'd imagine, to conceive of a world without numerous aspects we take for granted. Balzac's own physical Paris, so important in all his works set in the capital, was almost entirely different from the Paris we know and have known for many generations, even if only from famous impressionist paintings. To get a feel for the old Paris, the pre-Haussmann Paris, one has to seek out the rare copies of Marville's photographs. What we see in Marville's work are narrow, dark, medieval lanes and alleys, filthy, crumbling, stone shacks hundreds of years old and the disappearing remains of 18th Century broadsides painted onto the flaking walls of ancient, blackened warehouses and stables.
Balzac's Paris, the Paris so well-described and represented in his novels, consisted of an infinite assortment of, on the one hand, this dim, poor, threatening and oppressive public reality, and, on the other, the entirely hidden (though not in the case of the Palais Royale) world of incredible private luxury gilded and green with entirely private gardens. There is a substantial element of Balzac's work that can only be appreciated with that kind of (to us) incredible visual contrast between the luxury of the rich and the deprivation of the poor kept strongly in mind. We too, of course, are working hard at re-achieving that same kind of contrast today, though in our case the luxury is even more hidden than it was in Balzac's Paris.
Robb continually demonstrates his awareness of all of these subtle aspects of Balzac's works, whether generally or in specific novels, bringing them to the fore as and when appropriate. I had never before appreciated the extent to which Balzac entirely subjected his own personal life to the demands of his chosen profession. Twelve years devoted to teaching himself how to write. And then a literary career that took far more than its reasonable share of his existence for the creation of the Comedie Humaine. Then death at 51 while his father had lived almost to ninety. Are there as many self-destructs in American or British literary history as there are in French?
Robb's book is a "good" read, as opposed to a "fun" read. There's no sense at all in even beginning the book if you don't have at least some feeling for a few of Balzac's masterpieces. I'd say, minimum, Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet and La Cousine Bette. (For me, La Cousine Bette corresponds in a way to Bleak House for Dickens as a career landmark.) As for Balzac himself, well, does anyone really need encouragement? Balzac is (I think) one of those universal literary stars no one can disregard without seriously depriving themselves of a major pleasure.
Which is all by the by when it comes to Graham Robb on Balzac. Because Graham Robb, to me at least, has found the perfect medium between all of these extremes of failure. Robb's knowledge of his subject is complete, including not only Balzac's life but of Balzac's work and all criticism of Balzac's work. And Robb's treatment of his subject's life combines a very judicious balance of deep respect and sufficient irony to convince us that Robb has an appropriate perspective on the essential human-ness even of great writers.
It's always hard, I'd imagine, to conceive of a world without numerous aspects we take for granted. Balzac's own physical Paris, so important in all his works set in the capital, was almost entirely different from the Paris we know and have known for many generations, even if only from famous impressionist paintings. To get a feel for the old Paris, the pre-Haussmann Paris, one has to seek out the rare copies of Marville's photographs. What we see in Marville's work are narrow, dark, medieval lanes and alleys, filthy, crumbling, stone shacks hundreds of years old and the disappearing remains of 18th Century broadsides painted onto the flaking walls of ancient, blackened warehouses and stables.
Balzac's Paris, the Paris so well-described and represented in his novels, consisted of an infinite assortment of, on the one hand, this dim, poor, threatening and oppressive public reality, and, on the other, the entirely hidden (though not in the case of the Palais Royale) world of incredible private luxury gilded and green with entirely private gardens. There is a substantial element of Balzac's work that can only be appreciated with that kind of (to us) incredible visual contrast between the luxury of the rich and the deprivation of the poor kept strongly in mind. We too, of course, are working hard at re-achieving that same kind of contrast today, though in our case the luxury is even more hidden than it was in Balzac's Paris.
Robb continually demonstrates his awareness of all of these subtle aspects of Balzac's works, whether generally or in specific novels, bringing them to the fore as and when appropriate. I had never before appreciated the extent to which Balzac entirely subjected his own personal life to the demands of his chosen profession. Twelve years devoted to teaching himself how to write. And then a literary career that took far more than its reasonable share of his existence for the creation of the Comedie Humaine. Then death at 51 while his father had lived almost to ninety. Are there as many self-destructs in American or British literary history as there are in French?
Robb's book is a "good" read, as opposed to a "fun" read. There's no sense at all in even beginning the book if you don't have at least some feeling for a few of Balzac's masterpieces. I'd say, minimum, Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet and La Cousine Bette. (For me, La Cousine Bette corresponds in a way to Bleak House for Dickens as a career landmark.) As for Balzac himself, well, does anyone really need encouragement? Balzac is (I think) one of those universal literary stars no one can disregard without seriously depriving themselves of a major pleasure.
September 12, 2016
Before you read Balzac, or this biography, read "Germinal" by Zola. This will keep you from being swept under the romantic spell of 19th century literary life. Peasants and workers do not figure greatly in Balzac's novels, or in this bio. Today, we have to keep in mind the millions who die in Congo mining for the coltan that makes our computers and phones possible. So, too, we have to remember the miners depicted in "Germinal" whose suffering and exploitation paid for the furs, jewelry, mansions, fine furniture and fine art that Balzac strove to surround himself with.
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx loved Balzac for his spot-on depiction of capitalism and the decadent life of the bourgeoisie. It's quite fascinating to read about what Balzac had to do to make it as a writer in post-Revolutionary Paris. It's exactly what goes on today. And capitalism continues to birth the same kind of writers: haecks, flacks, plagiarists. hagiographers, and the occasional rebel and genius. Balzac was, of course the enfante terrible and genius. But he was an Absolutist who hated the masses. That also made him a racist who, like his character Vautrin, would have liked nothing better than to own slaves in the United States and retire on the profits.
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx loved Balzac for his spot-on depiction of capitalism and the decadent life of the bourgeoisie. It's quite fascinating to read about what Balzac had to do to make it as a writer in post-Revolutionary Paris. It's exactly what goes on today. And capitalism continues to birth the same kind of writers: haecks, flacks, plagiarists. hagiographers, and the occasional rebel and genius. Balzac was, of course the enfante terrible and genius. But he was an Absolutist who hated the masses. That also made him a racist who, like his character Vautrin, would have liked nothing better than to own slaves in the United States and retire on the profits.
November 28, 2010
Read Balzac! I recently reread Le Pere Goriot for the first time since college, and it led me to Graham Robb’s marvelous biography. A huge, voracious character who transformed what he saw into the immense 100+ volume La Comedie Humaine. Robb presents a man whose influence both in and outside France is still immense. Next I think I’ll read Illusions Perdues or Eugenie Grandet or La Cousine Bette.
December 26, 2020
I have sometimes criticized biographies for focusing too much on the work of the subject. But in this I don’t feel the work very much and wish it more present.
July 21, 2019
A generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail. Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subject, his literature and 19th century France. It is a birth to death story that takes until about page 150 (of small print) for Balzac to write what was essentially the first book under his name, The Last of the Chouans, around age 30. over the next 20 years of Balzac’s life—and 250 pages of the biography—he writes what there is of the Comedie Humaine. Robb does a great job rescuing Balzac from some of the myth’s that have encrusted around him, showing how he worked (lots of coffee and writing about 30 words a minute from late night until morning), how he handles his debts, his travels, and his many different failed schemes for work as a printer, playwright and more. He also shows his relationship with Eveline Hanska in great detail, the nearly 20 years of correspondence followed by less than a half year of marriage. Remarkable, one-fifth of Balzac’s writing in the last five years of his life was to Hanska making it, as Balzac says, like another one of Balzac’s novels. What emerges is a writer who invented the concept of an overlapping work populated by recurring characters, more than 500 of them, and through revisions and re-revisions brought an increasing coherence to this fictional world, creating a form of realism that helped to rescue literature from the romanticism that pervaded it at the time.
December 29, 2014
I found this book disappointing. At first I appreciated Robb’s interpretation of the events in the life of Balzac. A good biography is more than a collection of facts and statistics—it puts that information into context and perspective for the reader. I also initially liked how the author used his familiarity with Balzac’s fiction to flesh out events and get into the head of his subject. However, Robb’s frequent interjection of his own conjecture and psychoanalysis of Balzac muddled the details of the biography, and it bothered me enough that I stopped reading about two-thirds of the way through. I already have the basic Balzac story from another biography, and felt like those essentials occasionally got lost in the Robb’s commentary—they sometime interrupted and obscured the chain of events. Still, I’d recommend this bio to any hardcore Balzac fans—they would probably enjoy the author’s investigations and side trips.
Balzac: A Biographyappears to be Robb’s first biographical work. I am eighty pages into his biography of Victor Hugo, and it is much better than his work on Balzac—the author’s interpretation of events is less frivolous and more concise.
Balzac: A Biographyappears to be Robb’s first biographical work. I am eighty pages into his biography of Victor Hugo, and it is much better than his work on Balzac—the author’s interpretation of events is less frivolous and more concise.
March 25, 2017
i like Balzac more than ever now and I'm afraid i have to go back and read the human comedy again with my new found understanding. and the letters.
April 28, 2021
The best Balzac biography in English. A stupendous achievement by Graham Robb, the work he put into this book is astonishing. Not least, he read everything Balzac had written at least twice!
March 11, 2022
Maybe the most difficult literary biography I have read - both in terms of the task that Graham Robb undertook, and also the reading itself. Honore de Balzac was an exceedingly complicated man who wrote an exceedingly consequential oeuvre. I have read six books of Balzac's works: 'The Wrong Side of Paris', 'Lost Illusions', 'Père Goriot', 'Cousin Bette', 'Eugenie Grandet,' and a selection of some dozen pieces from 'The Human Comedy.' Not enough to even remotely claim any mastery of Balzac's works, but I am guessing representative, and it seems, containing some of his most prized stories.
Robb is to be credited with combining Balzac's life, personal and professional, with the contents of his writings. Here is a 19th-century author who sought to represent the life of France based on some 2,000 fictional characters, many of which show up in several different stories over the two decades of Balzac's literary production. And the variety of his story plots and settings is prodigious. Robb describes a manic, flawed genius. A person who never got out of massive amounts debt, had some 8 love affairs, consumed coffee by the gallon, and finally died at 51 of so many maladies that "cause of death" can't really be precisely known today.
Robb's 'Balzac: A Biography' has a useful Index of Works at the back which allows the reader to look up the English translations of the titles of Balzac's 90+ stories and novels, which are printed in French throughout the text. For this reader I would have preferred to see the English titles in the body, instead of having to flip back to the Index each time, but I understand his decision; I finally stopped looking the titles up and just went with the flow.
'Balzac: A Biography' helped me see this famous author and his works in a more complete light. Robb is to be congratulated for his achievement.
Robb is to be credited with combining Balzac's life, personal and professional, with the contents of his writings. Here is a 19th-century author who sought to represent the life of France based on some 2,000 fictional characters, many of which show up in several different stories over the two decades of Balzac's literary production. And the variety of his story plots and settings is prodigious. Robb describes a manic, flawed genius. A person who never got out of massive amounts debt, had some 8 love affairs, consumed coffee by the gallon, and finally died at 51 of so many maladies that "cause of death" can't really be precisely known today.
Robb's 'Balzac: A Biography' has a useful Index of Works at the back which allows the reader to look up the English translations of the titles of Balzac's 90+ stories and novels, which are printed in French throughout the text. For this reader I would have preferred to see the English titles in the body, instead of having to flip back to the Index each time, but I understand his decision; I finally stopped looking the titles up and just went with the flow.
'Balzac: A Biography' helped me see this famous author and his works in a more complete light. Robb is to be congratulated for his achievement.
November 24, 2013
This turn towards fiction is, for me, an attempt to mine the novels and biographies for insights into people and how they can be understood/helped/educated. This biography and Pere Goriot, by Balzac, both contribute. The Signet Classics edition of Pere is much easier to read than the other translations I have found, so be aware of that issue. Balzac's characters are complex and numerous enough that you are not likely to run out of things to read. Balzac only lived to about the age of 50, so what he accomplished is amazing in that light. He may have written, in some spurts, for about 45 out of 48 hours at a stretch. No writer's block there. He read one of Dickens' early stories, so that's an interesting tie in. I knew that it was a good idea to get expensive stuff for your love, but I didn't know what to say to go along with it. Here, for your benefit, is Honore (hence, Nore) Balzac's version: "'You are my whim, my passion, by vice...my mistress, my comrade, my louploup, my brother, my conscience, my happiness and my wife, and you must also be the object of my follies... for you are all my hope and all my life. If only you knew how carefully I am arranging everything!' 'And when you see it, you will say, "What, Nore, is that all it cost?"'" Looks like all three quotation marks (the middle one single)are warranted at the end. Anyone who knows better, please let me know.
Read
April 25, 2020One of my all-time favorite snippets from history is in this book. Robb is noting how Balzac hired fellow writer Henri de Latouche, who had helped the author move into his new digs, to hang his wallpaper, a skill for which de Latouche apparently had great talent. This came in handy given Balzac was intent on creating an apartment fit for a literary king. In a rather snarky moment, Robb wrote, “In choosing the paper, cutting it to size and fitting it to all the difficult angles, Latouche’s genius blossomed as it rarely did in his work.” Ouch! I read this book in order to do research for an essay in my book “The Modern Salonnière,” and I have excerpted this particular essay here: https://bit.ly/2JYUgnu
February 26, 2022
Hard to pin down Balzac but Robb did a good job. The great French writer gets out of hand. He becomes too much to handle. His writing life overflows in ways which defy experience. The man worked himself into an early grave but also managed to be everywhere and meet everyone. It hardly seems possible that his great project, the series of fifty something novels depicting every aspect of French society, La Comédie humaine, could have been written in such a chaotic life. Balzac managed to get himself spectacularly in debt at an early age and then spent the rest of his days writing himself out of the hole he had made. Debtor's prison was always a few missed payments away. Much like Dostoevsky. An awful way to live.
A truly fascinating life and a highly recommended biography.
A truly fascinating life and a highly recommended biography.
Read
July 31, 2011'Twas adequately written at best. I think when writing a biography you really should focus more on an organized, well written collection of facts. Instead, this author chose to spend too much time trying to be a half ass Freudian analyst whilst attempting to play the detective 150 years after the fact about very minor, minor facts. The reality is that academics should usually stick to writing useless papers keeping up their tenure instead of trying to be "artistes." The real savior of this book is that when old Balzac peers out from the pages, his genius is sweet redemption.
October 9, 2008
I have not read Balzac, I'v but read Grahm Robb.
January 16, 2016
Very colorful, stylish treatment of a larger than life figure. I am left a bit curious about the intellectual development of Balzac.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews