The Human Comedy

“The great thing about work this entertaining is that it’s still exciting nearly 200 years on.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

“These tales provide the reader a healthy introduction to Balzac’s famous hyperbole, his melodrama, and his extended descriptions and explanations where nothing goes unsaid. We don’t read Balzac for his refined style; rather, his genius lies in the sheer ambition of his reach, the vastness of his grasp.” —Publishers Weekly

“The characters and sentences still leap from the page as if they were trapped there just seconds ago. It’s just choosing where to begin….Happily, in The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, Peter Brooks has managed to capture this enormous range and more by plucking a mere nine of the Frenchmen’s best tales. There is a good range on display here, as broad as the Napoleonic Empire. Dandies and duchesses discuss the decline of aristocratic mores at a dinner party in “Another Study of Womankind.” In “A Passion in the Desert,” a soldier lost in the Sahara stumbles upon an oasis, which he discovers is inhabited by a panther. Out of such tales one can see how Balzac was the great-grandfather to writers as diverse as Colette and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” —The Boston Globe

“I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.” —Friedrich Engels

“In Balzac, every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will.” —Charles Baudelaire

“Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs together perfectly.” —Henry James
 
“Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense.” —V. S. Pritchett
 
“Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius.” —André Maurois