I'm Ready for You: On Balzac | Hacker News Reader

I'm Ready for You: On Balzac

lrb.co.uk

36 pointslermontov5 comments

I didn't really know much about Balzac before reading this piece. I was interested that he did so much to describe a Paris that is now long-gone. Coincidentally I am getting into Dickens at the moment, especially the view of him that he was the progenitor of the Urban fantasy genre, whose modern British proponents are Moorcock and Miéville and others. It left me wondering, is there any equivalent to the extensive London-based urban fantasy genre set in Paris or other big cities? I don't think Balzac wrote anything like Dicken's ghosts, but I'm curious now to find out.

Most of Balzac is highly realistic, but La peau de chagrin[0] comes to mind as an example of his work that includes magical elements, in this case a talisman that grants wishes at the cost of its owner's life.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Peau_de_chagrin

I don't know if Rabelais counts as urban fantasy. (The labels for him that come to mind are "comic grotesque" and "satirist")

When I was in high school I read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" thinking it would be another classic fanciful monster tale like Dracula. It wasn't, but it did capture all the different strata of Paris society. (So more "urban" than "fantasy"). Victor Hugo was excellent at that. And of course Paris was the other city in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities". (Whereas Alexandre Dumas books always felt more like a paperback page-turner...)

I don't know how you'd feel about Francois Villon -- not a novelist, but a French criminal-poet. The night before he was sentenced to death, he wrote a poem giving away pieces of himself and his life. The next day his sentence was commuted. There's a great biography of his life by Wyndham Lewis.

I had a chuckle.

I've heard the name a bunch but have never read anything by Balzac. The way the article describes his writing reminds me of The Wire - a fully immersed exploration of a dynamic urban landscape with care given to each party and their motivations. Sounds fascinating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com